i 



ON 

THE STUDY OF CELTIC LITERATURE. 



a 



ON 



THE STUDY 



OF 



CELTIC LITERATURE 



BY 

MATTHEW ARNOLD, 

PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 



^,bt»ry»fCo^^ 



18G7 * 



o LONDON : 
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 






o'^' 



^^\^^(.1 



[ The right of Translation is reserved. ] 



INTRODUCTION. 



The following remarks on the study of Celtic 
Literature formed the substance of four lectures 
given by me last year and the year before in the 
chair of poetry at Oxford. They were first pub- 
lished in the Cornhill Magazine, and are now 
reprinted from thence. Again and again, in the 
course of them, I have marked the very humble 
scope intended ; which is, not to treat any special 
branch of scientific Celtic studies (a task for which 
I am quite incompetent), but to point out the many 
directions in which the results of those studies 
offer matter of general interest, and to insist on 
the benefit we may all derive from knowing the 
Celt and things Celtic more thoroughly, It was 



( ii ) 
impossible, however, to avoid touching on certain 
points of ethnology and philology, which can be 
securely handled only by those who have made 
these sciences the object of special study. Here 
the mere literary critic must owe his whole safety to 
his tact in choosing authorities to follow, and what- 
ever he advances must be understood a^ advanced 
with a sense of the insecurity which, after all, attaches 
to such a mode of proceeding, and as put forward 
provisionally, by way of hypothesis rather than of 
confident assertion. 

To mark clearly to the reader both this pro- 
visional character of much which I advance, and 
my own sense of it, I have inserted, as a check 
upon some of the positions adopted in the text, 
notes and comments with which Lord Strang- 
ford has kindly furnished me. Lord Strangford is 
hardly less distinguished for knowing ethnology and 
languages so scientifically than for knowing so much 
of them ; and his interest, even from the vantage- 
ground of his scientific knowledge, and after making 
all due reserves on points of scientific detail, in 
my treatment, — with merely the resources and point 



( iii ) 

of view of a literary critic at my command, — of 
such a subject as the study of Celtic Litera- 
ture, is the most encouraging assurance I could 
have received that my attempt Is not altogether a 
vain one. 

Both Lord Strangford and others whose opinion 
I respect have said that I am unjust In calling 
Mr. Nash, the acute and learned author of Taliesin, 
or the Bards and Druids of Britain, a " Celt-hater." 
" He IS a denouncer," says Lord Strangford In a 
note on this expression, '' of Celtic extravagance, 
that Is all ; he is an antl-Philocelt, a very different 
thing from an anti-Celt, and quite Indispensable In 
scientific inquiry. As Philoceltism has hitherto, — 
hitherto, remember, — meant nothing but uncritical 
acceptance and irrational admiration of the beloved 
object's sayings and doings, without reference to 
truth one way or the other, it Is surely In the 
interest of science to support him In the main. In 
tracing the workings of old Celtic leaven in poems 
which embody the Celtic soul of all time in a 
mediaeval form, I do not see that you come Into any 
necessary opposition with him, for your concern is 



( iv ) 

with the spirit, his with the substance only." I 
entirely agree with almost all which Lord Strangford 
here urges, and indeed, so sincere is my respect for 
Mr. Nash's critical discernment and learning, and so 
unhesitating my recognition of the usefulness, in many 
respects, of the work of demolition performed by him, 
that in originally designating him as a Celt-hater, I 
hastened to add, as the reader will see by referring 
to the passage,-'' words of explanation and apology 
for so calling him. But I thought then, and I think 
still, that Mr. Nash, in pursuing his work of demo- 
lition, too much puts out of sight the positive and 
constructive performance for which this work of 
demolition is to clear the ground. I thought then, 
and I think still, that in this Celtic controversy, as 
in other controversies, it is most desirable both to 
believe and to profess that the work of construction 
is the fruitful and important work, and that we are 
demolishing only to prepare for it. Mr. Nash's 
scepticism seems to me, — in the aspect in which his 
work, on the whole, shows it, — too absolute, too 

" See p. 34 of the following essay. 



( V ) 
stationary, too much without a future ; and this 
tends to make it, for the non-Celtic part of his 
readers, less fruitful than^ it otherwise would be, and 
for his Celtic readers, harsh and repellent. I have 
therefore suffered my remarks on Mr. Nash still to 
stand, though with a little modification ; but I hope 
he will read them by the light of these explana- 
tions, and that he will believe my sense of esteem 
for his work to be a thousand times stronger than 
my sense of difference from it. 

To lead towards solid ground, where the Celt 
may with legitimate satisfaction point to traces of 
the gifts and workings of his race, and where the 
Englishman may find himself induced to sympa- 
thise with that satisfaction and to fed an interest in 
it, is the design of all the considerations urged in 
the following essay. Kindly taking the will for the 
deed, a Welshman and an old acquaintance of mine, 
Mr. Hugh Owen, received my remarks with so 
much cordiality, that he asked me to come to the 
Eisteddfod last summer at Chester, and there to 
read a paper on some topic of Celtic literature or 
antiquities. In answer to this flattering proposal 

b 



( vi ) 

of Mr. Owen's, I wrote him a letter which appeared 
at the time in several newspapers, and of which 
the following extract preserves all that is of any 
importance : — 

" My knowledge of Welsh matters is so utterly 
insignificant that it would be impertinence in me, 
under any circumstances, to talk about those matters 
to an assemblage of persons, many of w^hom have 
passed their lives in studying them. 

'' Your gathering acquires more interest every 
year. Let me venture to say that you have to avoid 
two dangers in order to work all the good which your 
friends could desire. You have to avoid the danger 
of giving offence to practical men by retarding the 
spread of the English language in the principality. 
I believe that to preserve and honour the Welsh 
language and literature is quite compatible with not 
thwarting or delaying for a single hour the introduc- 
tion, so undeniably useful, of a knowledge of English 
among all classes in Wales. You have to avoid, 
again, the danger of alienating men of science by a 
blind, partial, and uncritical treatment of your national 
antiquities. Mr. Stephens's excellent book, The Lite- 



( vii ) 

rature of the Cymiy, shows how perfectly Welshmen 
can avoid this danger if they will. 

" When I see the enthusiasm these Eisteddfods 
can awaken in your whole people, and then think of 
the tastes, the literature, the amusements, of our 
own lower and middle class, I am filled with admi- 
ration for you. It is a consoling thought, and one 
which history allows us to entertain, that nations 
disinherited of political success may yet leave their 
mark on the world's progress, and contribute power- 
fully to the civilisation of mankind. We in England 
have come to that point when the continued advance 
and greatness of our nation is threatened by one 
cause, and one cause above all. Far more than by 
the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast 
coming to an end, far more than by the rawness 
of a lower class whose day is only just beginning, 
we are emperilled by what I call the ' Philistinism ' 
of our middle class. On the side of beauty and 
taste, vulgarity ; on the side of morals and feeling, 
coarseness ; on the side of mind and spirit, unintel- 
ligence, — this is Philistinism. Now, then, is the 
moment for the greater delicacy and spirituality of 



( vlii ) 

the Celtic peoples who are blended with us, if it 
be but wisely directed, to make itself prized and 
honoured. In a certain measure the children of 
Taliesin and Ossian have now an opportunity for 
renewing the famous feat of the Greeks, and 
conquering their conquerors. No service England 
can render the -Celts by giving "you a share in her 
many good qualities, can surpass that which the 
Celts can at this moment render England, by com- 
municating to us some of theirs." 

Now certainly, in that letter, written to a Welsh- 
man and on the occasion of a Welsh festival, I 
enlarged on the merits of the Celtic spirit and of its 
works, rather than on their demerits. It would have 
been offensive and inhuman to do otherwise. , When 
an acquaintance asks you to write his father s epitaph, 
you do not generally seize that opportunity for saying 
that his father was blind of one eye, and had an 
unfortunate habit of not paying his tradesmen's bills. 
But the weak side of Celtism and of its Celtic glori- 
fiers, the danger against which they have to guard, 
is clearly indicated in that letter ; and in the remarks 
reprinted in this volume, — remarks which were 



( ix ) 

the original cause of Mr. Owen's writing to me, 
and must have been fully present to his mind when 
he read my letter, — the shortcomings both of the 
Celtic race, and of the Celtic students of its literature 
and antiquities, are unreservedly marked, and, so far 
as is necessary, blamed.* It was, indeed, not my 
purpose to make blame the chief part of what I 
said ; for the Celts, like other people, are to be 
meliorated rather by developing their gifts than by 
chastising their defects. The wise man, says Spi- 
noza admirably, " de hutnana impotentia non nisi 
parce loqui cui^abit, at largiter de humana virtute 
seu potential But so far as condemnation of Celtic 
failure was needful towards preparing the way for 
the growth of Celtic virtue, I used condemnation. 

The Times, however, prefers a shorter and sharper 
method of dealing with the Celts, and in a couple of 
leading articles, having the Chester Eisteddfod and 
my letter to Mr. Hugh Owen for their text, it deve- 
loped with great frankness, and in its usual forcible 
style, its own views for the amelioration of Wales 

* See particularly pp. ii, 12, 13, of the following essay. 



( X ) 

and its people. Cease to do evil, learn to do good, was 
the upshot of its exhortations to the Welsh ; by evil, 
the Times understanding all things Celtic, and by 
good, all things English. " The Welsh language is 
the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance 
of English have excluded, and even now exclude 
the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English 
neighbours. An Eisteddfod is one of the most mis- 
chievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which 
could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish 
interference with the natural progress of civilisation 
and prosperity. If it is desirable that the Welsh 
should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encou- 
rage them in a loving fondness for their old language. 
Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence 
and music of Europe have come mainly from Teu- 
tonic' sources, and this glorification of everything 
Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer igno- 
rance. The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear 
from the face of the earth the better." 

And I need hardly say, that I myself, as so often 
happens to me at the hands of my own countrymen, 
was cruelly judged by the Times, and most severe!)' 



( xi ) 

treated. What I said to Mr. Owen about the spread 
of the English language in Wales being quite com- 
patible with preserving and honouring the Welsh 
language and literature, was tersely set down as 
" arrant nonsense," and I was characterised as '' a 
sentimentalist who talks nonsense about the children 
of Taliesin and Osslan, and whose dainty taste 
requires something more flimsy than the strong sense 
and sturdy morality of his fellow Englishmen." 

As I said before, I am unhappily Inured to 
having these harsh interpretations put by my fellow 
Englishmen upon what I write, and I no longer 
cry out about it. And then, too, I have made a 
study of the Corinthian or leading article style, and 
know its exigences, and that they are no more to be 
quarrelled with than the law of gravitation. So, for 
my part, when I read these asperities of the Times, 
my mind did not dwell very much on my own con- 
cern in them ; but what I said to myself, as I put 
the newspaper down, was this : " Behold Eiigland's 
difficulty in gove7^ning Irelajtd / " 

I pass by the dauntless assumption that the 
agricultural peasant whom we In England, without 



( xii ) 

Eisteddfods, succeed in developing, is so much finer 
a product of civilisation than the Welsh peasant, 
retarded by these "pieces of sentimentalism." I will 
be content to suppose that our " strong sense and 
sturdy morality " are as admirable and as universal 
as the Times pleases. But even supposing this, I 
will ask : did any one ever hear of strong sense and 
sturdy morality being thrust down other people's 
throats in this fashion ? Might not these divine 
English gifts, and the English language in which 
they are preached, have a better chance of making 
their way among the poor Celtic heathen, if the 
English apostle delivered his message a little more 
agreeably ? There is nothing like love and admira- 
tion for bringing people to a likeness with what they 
love and admire ; but the Englishman seems never 
to dream of employing these influences upon a race 
he wants to fuse with himself He employs simply 
material interests for his work of fusion ; and, beyond 
these, nothing except scorn and rebuke. Accordingly 
there is no vital union between him and the races he 
has annexed ; and while France can truly boast of 
her " magnificent unity," a unity of spirit no less than 



( xiii ) 

of name between all the people who compose her, 
in England the Englishman proper is in union of 
spirit with no one except other Englishmen proper 
like himself. His Welsh and Irish fellow-citizens are 
hardly more amalgamated with him now than they 
were when Wales and Ireland were first conquered, 
and the true unity of even these small islands has 
yet to be achieved. When these papers of mine on 
the Celtic genius and literature first appeared in the 
Cornhill Magazine, they brought me, as was natural, 
many communications from Welshmen and Irishmen 
having an interest in the subject ; and one could not 
but be painfully struck, in reading these communi- 
cations, to see how profound a feeling of aversion 
and severance from the English they in general 
manifested. Who can be surprised at it, when he 
observes the strain of the Times in the articles just 
quoted, and remembers that this is the characteristic 
strain of the Englishman in commenting on whatso- 
ever is not himself ? And then, with our boundless 
faith in machinery, we English expect the Welshman 
as a matter of course to" grow attached to us, because 
we invite him to do business with us, and let him 



( 



XIV 



) 



hold any number of public meetings and publish all 
the newspapers he likes ! When shall we learn, that 
what attaches people to us is the spirit we are of, and 
not the machinery we employ ? 

Last year there was a project of holding a 
Breton Eisteddfod at Quimper in Brittany, and the 
French Home Secretary, whether wishing to protect 
the magnificent unity of France from inroads of Bre- 
tonism, or fearing lest the design should be used in 
furtherance of Legitimist intrigues, or from whatever 
motive, issued §.n order which prohibited the meeting. 
If Mr. Walpole had issued an order prohibiting the 
Chester Eisteddfod, all the Englishmen from Corn- 
wall to John o' Groat's House would have rushed to 
the rescue; and our strong sense and sturdy morality 
would never have stopped gnashing their teeth and 
rending their garments till the prohibition was re- 
scinded. What a pity our strong sense and sturdy 
morality fail to perceive that words like those of 
the Times create a far keener sense of estrangement 
and dislike than acts like those of the French 
Minister ! Acts like those of the French Minister 
are attributed to reasons of State, and the Govern- 



( XV ) 

ment Is held blameable for them, not the French 
people. Articles like those of the Timei, are attri- 
buted to the want of sympathy and of sweetness of 
disposition In the English nature, and the whole 
English people gets the blame of them. And deser- 
vedly; for from some such ground of want of sympathy 
and sweetness in the English nature, do articles like 
those of the Times come, and to some such ground 
do they make appeal. The sympathetic and social 
virtues of the French nature, on the other hand, 
actually repair the breaches made by oppressive deeds 
of the Government; and create, among populations 
joined with France as the Welsh and Irish are joined 
with England, a sense of liking and attachment 
towards the French people. The French Govern- 
ment may discourage the German language In Alsace 
and prohibit Eisteddfods in Brittany ; but the Jottrnal 
des Dibats never treats German music and poetry as 
mischievous lumber, nor tells the Bretons that the 
sooner all Breton specialities disappear from the face 
of the earth the better. Accordingly, the Bretons 
and Alsatians have come to feel themselves a part 
of France, and to feel pride in bearing the French 



( -xvi ) 

name ; while the Welsh and Irish obstinately refuse 
to amalgamate with us, and will not admire the 
Englishman as he admires himself, however much the 
Times may scold them and rate them, and assure 
them there is nobody on earth so admirable. 

* And at what a moment does it assure them of 
this, good heavens ! At a moment when the ice is 
breaking up in England, and we are all beginning at 
last to see how much real confusion and insufficiency 
it covered ; when, whatever may be the merits, — and 
they are great, — of the Englishman and of his strong 
sense and sturdy morality, it is growing more and 
more evident that, if he is to endure and advance, he 
must transform himself, must add something to his 
strong sense and sturdy morality, or at least must 
give to these excellent gifts of his a new develop- 
ment. My friend Mr. Goldwin Smith says, in his elo- 
quent way, that England is the favourite of Heaven. 
Far be it from me to say that England is not the 
favourite of Heaven ; but at this moment she re- 
minds me more of what the prophet Isaiah calls, 
" a bull in a net." She has satisfied herself in all 
departments with clap-trap and routine so long, and 



( xvil ) 

she is now so astounded at finding they will not 
serve her turn any longer ! And this Is the moment, 
when Englishism pure and simple, which with all its 
fine qualities managed always to make itself singularly 
unattractive, is losing that imperturbable faith in its 
untransformed self which at any rate made it im- 
posing, — this is the moment when our great organ 
tells the Celts that everything of theirs not English 
is "simply a foolish interference with the natural 
progress of civilisation and prosperity ; " and poor 
Talhalarn, venturing to remonstrate, is commanded 
" to drop his outlandish title, and to refuse even to 
talk Welsh in Wales ! " 

But let us leave the dead to bury their dead, and 
let us who are alive go on unto perfection. Let the 
Celtic members of this empire consider that they 
too have to transform themselves ; and though the 
summons to transform themselves be often conveyed 
harshly and brutally, and with the cry to root up 
their wheat as well as their tares, yet that is no 
reason why the summons should not be followed so 
far as their tares are concerned. Let them consider 
that they are inextricably bound up with us, and 



J 

( xviii ) 

that, if the suggestions in the following pages have 
any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to our 
Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown 
ourselves, have notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any 
other nation, a thousand latent springs of possible 
sympathy with them. Let them consider that new 
ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by 
day these new ideas and forces gain in power, and 
that almost every one of them is the friend of the 
Celt and not his enemy. And, whether our Celtic 
partners will consider this or no, at any rate let us 
ourselves, all of us who are proud of being the 
ministers of these new ideas, work incessantly to 
procure for them a wider and more fruitful appli- 
cation ; and to remove the main ground of the 
Celt's alienation from the Englishman, by substi- 
tuting, in place of that type of Englishman with 
whom alone the Celt has too long been familiar, a 
new type, more intelligent, more gracious, and 
more humane. 



" They went forth to the war, but they always fell," 

OSSIAN, 



ON THE STUDY 



OF 



CELTIC LITERATURE. 



The summer before last I spent some weeks at 
Llandudno, on the Welsh coast. The best lodg- 
ing-houses at Llandudno look eastward, towards 
Liverpool ; and from that Saxon hive swarms are 
incessantly issuing, crossing the bay, and taking 
possession of the beach and the lodging-houses. 
Guarded by the Great and Little Orme's Head, 
and alive with the ^ixon invaders from Liverpool, 
the eastern bay is an attractive point of interest, and 
many visitors to Llandudno never contemplate any- 
thing else. But, putting aside the charm of the 
Liverpool steam-boats, perhaps the view, on this 
side, a little dissatisfies one after ^ while ; the 



Ik 



( 2 ) 

horizon wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the 
coast wants verdure, and has a too bare austereness 
and aridity. At last one turns round and looks 
westward. Everything is changed. Over the 
mouth of the Conway and its sands is the eternal 
softness and mild light of the west ; the low line of 
the mystic Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaen- 
mawr, and the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn 
and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, 
hill behind hill, in an aerial haze, make the horizon ; 
between the foot of Penmaenmawr and the bending 
coast of Anglesey, the sea, a silver stream, dis- 
appears one knows not whither. On this side, 
Wales, — Wales, where the past still lives, where 
every place has its tradition, every name its poetry, 
and where the people, the genuine people, still knows 
this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with 
it, and clings to it ; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon 
on the other side, the invader from Liverpool and 
Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his. And the 
promontory where Llandudno stands is the very 
centre of this tradition ; it is Creuddyn, the bloody 
city, where every stone has its story ; there, opposite 
its decaying rival, Conway Castle, is Diganwy, not 



( 3 ) 

decaying but long since utterly decayed, some crum- 
bling foundations on a crag-top and nothing more ; 
— Diganwy, where Mael-gwyn shut up Elphin, and 
where Taliesin came to free him. Below, in a fold 
of the hill, is Llan-rhos, the church of the marsh, 
where the same Mael-gwyn, a British prince of real 
history, a bold and licentious chief, the original, it is 
said, of Arthur's Lancelot, shut himself up in the 
church to avoid the Yellow Plague, and peeped out 
through a hole in the door, and saw the monster 
and died. Behind among the woods, is Glod-daeth, 
the place of feasting, where the bards were enter- 
tained ; and further away, up the valley of the 
Conway towards Llanrwst, is the Lake of Ceirio- 
nydd and Taliesin's grave. Or, again, looking 
seawards and Anglesey-wards, you have Pen-mon, 
Seiriol's isle and priory, where Mael-gwyn lies 
buried ; you have the Sands of Lamentation and 
Llys Helig, Helig s Mansion, a mansion under the 
waves, a sea-buried palace and realm. Hac ibat 
Simois ; hie est Sigeia telhts. 

As I walked up and down, last August year, 
looking at the waves as they washed this Sigeian 
land which has never had its Homer, and listening 

I — 2 



( 4 ) 

with curiosity to the strange, unfamiliar speech of 
its old possessors' obscure descendants,^ — bathing 
people, vegetable-sellers, and donkey boys, — who 
were all about me, suddenly I heard, through the 
stream of unknown Welsh, words, not English, 
indeed, but still familiar. They came from a French 
nursery-maid, with some children. Profoundly igno- 
rant of her relationship, this Gaulish Celt moved 
among her British cousins, speaking her polite neo- 
Latin tongue, and full of compassionate contempt, 
probably, for the Welsh barbarians and their jargon. 
What a revolution was here ! How had the sfer.of 
this daughter of Gomer waxed, while the star of 
these Cymry, his sons, had waned ! What a differ- 
ence of fortune in the two, since the days when, 
speaking the same language, they left their common 
dwelling-place in the heart of Asia; since the Cim- 
merians of the Euxine came in upon their western 
kinsmen, the sons of the giant Galates ; since the 
sisters, Gaul and Britain, cut the mistletoe in their 
forests, and saw the coming of Csesar ! Blanc, roicge, 
rocher, champ, eglise, seigneur, — these words, by 
which the Gallo-Roman Celt now names white, and 
red, and rock, and field, and church, and lord, are 



( 5 ) 

no part of the speech of his true ancestors, they 
are words he has learnt ; but since he learnt them 
they have had a world-wide success, and we all 
teach them to our children, and armies speaking 
them have domineered In every city of that Ger- 
many by which the British Celt was broken, and 
in the train of these armies, Saxon auxiliaries, a 
humbled contingent, have been fain to follow ; — the 
poor Welshman still says, in the genuine tongue of 
his 'd.nz^^X.QXs,^ gwyn, goch, craig, maes, llan, arglwydd ; 

* Lord Strangford remarks on this passage : — " Your Gomer 
and your Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be accepted 
in the rhetorical and subjective sense. As such I accept them, 
but I enter a protest against the ' genuine tongue of his ancestors.' 
Modern Celtic tongues are to the old Celtic heard by Julius 
Caesar, broadly speaking, what the modern Romanic tongues are to 
Caesar's own Latin. Welsh, in fact, is a detritus ; a language in 
the category of modern French, or, to speak less roughly and 
with a closer approximation, of old Provencal, not in the category 
of Lithuanian, much less in the category of Basque. By true 
inductive research, based on an accurate comparison of such forms 
of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as we now possess, modern 
philology has, in so far as was possible, succeeded in restoring 
certain forms of the parent speech, and in so doing has achieved 
not the least striking of its many triumphs ; for those very forms 
thus restored have since been verified past all cavil by their actual 
discovery in the old Gaulish inscriptions recently come to light. 
The phonesis of Welsh as it stands is modern, not primitive ; its 



( 6 ) 

but his land is a province, and his history petty, and 
his Saxon subduers scout his speech as an obstacle 
to civilization ; and the echo of all its kindred in 
other lands is growing every day fainter and more 
feeble ; gone in Cornwall, going in Brittany and the 
Scotch Highlands, going, too, in Ireland ; — and there, 
above all, the badge of the beaten race, the property 
of the vanquished. 

But the Celtic genius was just then preparing, in 
Llandudno, to have its hour of revival. Workmen 
were busy in putting up a large tent-like wooden 
building, which attracted the eye of every new- 
comer, and which my little boys believed (their 
wish, no doubt, being father to their belief,) to be a 
circus. It turned out, however, to be no circus for 
Castor and Pollux, but a temple for Apollo and 

grammar, — the verbs excepted, — is constructed out of the fragments 
of its earlier forms, and its vocabulary is strongly Romanised, two 
out of the six words here given being Latin of the Empire. 
Rightly understood, this enhances the value of modem Celtic 
instead of depreciating it, because it serves to rectify it. To me it 
is a wonder that Welsh should have retained so much of its 
integrity under thie iron pressure of four hundred years of Roman 
dominion.. Modern Welsh tenacity and cohesive power under 
English pressure is nothing compared with what that must have 
been." 



( 7 ) 

the Muses. It was the place where the Eisteddfod, 
or Bardic Congress of Wales, was about to be held ; 
a meeting which has for its object (I quote the 
words of its promoters) *' the diffusion of useful 
knowledge, the eliciting of native talent, and the 
cherishing of love of home and honourable fame by 
the cultivation of poetry, music, and art." My little 
boys were disappointed ; but I, whose circus days are 
over, I, who have a professional interest in poetry, 
and who, also, hating all one-sidedness and oppression, 
wish nothing better than that the Celtic genius should 
be able to show itself to the world and to make its voice 
heard, was delighted. I took my ticket, and waited 
impatiently for the day of opening. The day came, 
an unfortunate one ; storms of wind, clouds of dust, 
an angry, dirty sea. The Saxons who arrived by 
the Liverpool steamers looked miserable ; even the 
Welsh who arrived by land, — whether they were 
discomposed by the bad morning, or by the mon- 
strous and crushing tax which the London and 
North- Western Railway Company levies on all 
whom it transports across those four miles of marshy 
peninsula between Conway and Llandudno, — did not 
look happy. First we went to the Gorsedd, or pre- 



( 8 ) 

liminary congress for conferring the degree of bard. 
The Gorsedd was held in the open air, at the windy- 
corner of a street, and the morning was not favour- 
able to open-air solemnities. The Welsh, too, share, 
it seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an 
inaptitude for show and spectacle. Show and spec- 
tacle are better managed by the Latin race, and 
those whom it has moulded ; the Welsh, like us, are 
a little awkward and resourceless in the organi- 
sation of a festival. The presiding genius of the 
mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth century 
costume relieved only by a green scarf, the wind 
drowning his voice and the dust powdering his 
whiskers, looked thoroughly wretched ; so did the 
aspirants for bardic honours ; and I believe, after 
about an hour of it, we all of us, as we stood 
shivering round the sacred stones, began half to 
wish for the Druid's sacrificial knife to end our 
sufferings. But the Druid's knife is gone from his 
hands ; so we sought the shelter of the Eisteddfod 
building. 

The sight inside was not lively. The president 
and his supporters mustered strong on the platform. 
On the floor the one or two front benches were 



I 



( 9 ) 

pretty well filled, but their occupants were for the 
most part Saxons, who came there from curiosity, 
not from enthusiasm ; and all the middle and back 
benches, where should have been the true enthu- 
siasts, — the Welsh people, — were nearly empty. 
The president, I am sure, showed a national spirit 
which was admirable. He addressed us Saxons in 
our own language, and called us " the English 
branch of the descendants of the ancient Britons." 
We received the compliment with the impassive 
dulness which is the characteristic of our nature ; 
^and the lively Celtic nature, which should have 
made up for the dulness of ours, was absent.-* A 
lady who sat by me, and who was the wife, I found, 
of a distinguished bard on the platform, told me, 
with emotion in her look and voice, how dear were 
these solemnities to the heart of her people, how 
deep was the interest which is aroused by them. 
I believe her, but still the whole performance, on 
that particular morning, was incurably lifeless. The 
recitation of the prize compositions began : pieces 
of verse and prose in the Welsh language, an essay 
on punctuality being, if I remember right, one of 
them ; a poem on the march of Havelock, another. 



( lo ) 

This went on for some time. Then Dr. Vaughan, 
— the well-known Nonconformist minister, a Welsh- 
man, and a good patriot, — addressed us in English. 
His speech was a powerful one, and he succeeded, I 
confess, in sending a faint thrill through our front 
benches ; but it was the old familiar thrill which we 
have all of us felt a thousand times in Saxon chapels 
and meeting-halls, and had nothing bardic about it. 
I stepped out, and in the street I came across an 
acquaintance fresh from London and the parliamen- 
tary session. In a moment the spell of the Celtic 
genius was forgotten, the Philistinism of our Saxon 
nature made itself felt ; and my friend and I walked 
up and down by the roaring waves, talking not of 
ovates and bards, and triads and englyns, but of the 
sewage question, and the glories of our local self- 
government, and the mysterious perfections of the 
Metropolitan Board of Works. 

I believe it is admitted, even by the admxirers of 
Eisteddfods in general, that this particular Eistedd- 
fod was not a success. Llandudno, it is said, was 
not the right place for it. Held in Conway Castle, 
as a few years ago it was, and its spectators, — an 
enthusiastic multitude, — filling the grand old ruin, I 



( M ) 

can imagine it a most impressive and interesting 
sight, even to a stranger labouring under the terrible 
disadvantage of being ignorant of the Welsh lan- 
guage. But even seen as I saw it at Llandudno, it 
had the power to set one thinking. An Eisteddfod 
is, no doubt, a kind of Olympic meeting; and that 
the common people of Wales should care for such 
a thing, shows something Greek in them, something 
spiritual, something humane, something (I am afraid 
one must add) which in the English common people 
is not to be found. This line of reflection has been 
followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David's, 
and by the Saturday Review ; it is just, it is fruitful, 
and those who pursued it merit our best thanks. 
But, from peculiar circumstances, the Llandudno 
meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to 
suggest ideas of Olympia, and of a multitude touched 
by the divine flame, and hanging on the lips of 
Pindar. It rather suggested the triumph of the 
prosaic, practical Saxon, and the approaching extinc- 
tion of an enthusiasm which he derides as factitious, 
a literature which he disdains as trash, a language 
which he detests as a nuisance. 

I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother 



/ 



( 12 ) 

Saxons as to the practical inconvenience of perpe- 
tuating the speaking of Welsh. It may cause a 
moment's distress to one's imagination when one 
hears that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the 
old tongue of Cornwall is dead ; but, no doubt, 
Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for 
becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the 
country. The fusion of all the inhabitants of these 
islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking 
whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, 
the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, 
is a consummation to which the natural course of 
things irresistibly tends ; it is a necessity of what is 
called modern civilisation, and modern civilisation is 
a real, legitimate force ; the change must come, and 
its accomplishment is a mere affair of time. The 
sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instru- 
ment of the practical, political, social life of Wales, 
the better ; the better for England, the better for 
Wales itself. Traders and tourists do excellent ser- 
vice by pushing the English wedge further and further 
into the heart of the principality ; Ministers of Educa- 
tion, by hammering it harder and harder into the 
elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much 



( 13 ) 

sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an 
instrument of living literature ; and in this respect 
Eisteddfods encourage, I think, a fantastic and mis- 
chief-working delusion. For all serious purposes in 
modern literature (and trifling purposes in it who 
would care to encourage ?) the language of a Welsh- 
man is and must be English ; if an Eisteddfod 
author has anything to say about punctuality or 
about the march of Havelock, he had much better 
say it in English ; or rather, perhaps, what he has to 
say on these subjects may as well be said in Welsh, 
but the moment he has anything of real importance 
to say, anything the world will the least care to hear, 
he must speak English. Dilettantism might pos- 
s.ibly do much harm here, might mislead and waste 
and bring to nought a genuine talent. For all modern 
purposes, I repeat, let us all as soon as possible be 
one people ; let the Welshman speak English, and, 
if he is an author, let him write English. 

So far, I go along with the stream of my brother 
Saxons ; but here, I imagine, I part company with 
them. /They will have nothing to do with the 
Welsh language and literature on any terms ; they 
would gladly make a clean sweep of it from the face 



■ ( 14 ) 

of the earth. I, on certain terms, wish to make a 
great deal more of it than is made now ; and I 
regard the Welsh literature, — or rather, dropping 
the distinction between Welsh and Irish, Gaels 
and Cymris, let me say Celtic literature, — as an 
object of very great interest. My brother Saxons 
have, as is well known, a terrible way with them 
of wanting to improve everything but themselves 
off the face of the earth ; I have no such passion 
for finding nothing but myself everywhere ; I 
like variety to exist and to show^ itself to me, 
and I would not for the world have the linea- 
ments of the Celtic genius lost. But I know my 
brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I know 
that the Celtic genius will make nothing of trying to 
set up barriers against them in the world of fact and 
brute force, of trying to hold its own against them 
as a political and social counter-power, as the soul 
of a hostile nationality. To me there is something 
mournful (and at this moment, when one sees what 
is going on in Ireland, how well may one say so !) in 
hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make preten- 
sions, — natural pretensions, I admit, but how hope- 
lessly vain ! — to such a rival self-establishment ; 



( 15 ) 

there Is something mournful in hearing an English- 
man scout them. Strength ! alas, it is not strength, 
strength in the material world, which is wanting to 
us Saxons ; we have plenty of strength for swal- 
lowing up and absorbing as much as we choose ; 
there is nothing to hinder us from effacing the last 
poor material remains of that Celtic power which 
once was everywhere, but has long since, in the race 
of civilisation, fallen out of sight. We may threaten 
them with extinction if we will, and may almost say 
in so threatening them, like Caesar in threatening 
with death the tribune Metellus who closed the 
treasury doors against him : '' And when I threaten 
this, young man, to threaten it is more trouble to me 
than to do it." It is not in the outward and visible 
world of material life, that the Celtic genius of Wales 
or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much ; 
it is in the inward world of thought and science. 
What it Aas been, what it Aas done, let it ask us to 
attend to that, as a matter of science and history ; 
not to what it will be or will do, as a matter 
of modern politics. It cannot count appreciably 
now as a material power; but, perhaps, if it 
can get itself thoroughly known as an object of 



( i6 ) 

science, it may count for a good deal, — far more 
than we Saxons, most of us, imagine, — as a spiritual 
power. 

The bent of our time is towards science, towards 
knowing things as they are; so the Celt's claims 
towards having his genius and its works fairly 
treated, as objects of scientific investigation, the 
Saxon can hardly reject, when these claims are urged 
simply on their own merits, and are not mixed up 
with extraneous pretensions which jeopardise them. 
What the French call the science des origines, the 
science of origins, — a science which is at the bottom 
of all real knowledge of the actual world, and which 
is every day growing in interest and importance, — is 
very incomplete without a thorough critical account 
of the Celts, and their genius, language, and litera- 
ture. This science has still great progress to make, 
but its progress, made even within the recollection 
of those of us who are in middle life, has already 
affected our common notions about the Celtic race ; 
and this change, too, shows how science, the know- 
ing things as they are, may even have salutary 
practical consequences. I remember, when I w^as 
young, I was taught to think of Celt as separated by 



■ ( 17 ) 

an impassable gulf from Teuton ;* my father, in 
particular, was never weary of contrasting them ; 



* Here again let me have the pleasure of quoting Lord 
Strangford : — " When the Celtic tongues were first taken in hand 
at the dawn of comparative philological inquiry, the tendency 
was, for all practical results, to separate them from the Indo- 
European aggregate, rather than to unite them with it. The 
great gulf once fixed between them was narrowed on the surface, 
but it was greatly and indefinitely deepened. Their vocabulary 
and some of their grammar was seen at once to be perfectly Indo- 
European, but they had no case-endings to their nduns, — none at 
all in Welsh, none that could be understood in Gaelic ; their 
phoii'^sis seemed primeval and inexplicable, and nothing could be 
*made out of their pronouns which could not be equally made out 
of many wholly un-Aryan languages. They were therefore 
co-ordinated, not with each single Aryan tongue, but with the 
general complex of Aryan tongues, and were conceived to be 
anterior to them and apart from them, as it were the strayed 
vanguard of European colonisation or conquest from the East. 
The reason of this misconception was, that their records lay wholly 
uninvestigated as far as all historical study of the language was 
concerned, and that nobody troubled himself about the relative 
age and the development of forms, so that the philologists were 
fain to take them as they were put into their hands by un- 
critical or perverse native commentators and writers, whose 
grammars and dictionaries teemed with blunders and downright 
forgeries. One thing, and one thing alone, led to the truth : the 
sheer drudgery of thirteen long years spent by Zeuss in the 
patient investigation of the most ancient Celtic records, in their 
actual condition, line by line and letter by letter. Then for the 



( i8 ) 

he insisted much oftener on the separation between 
us and them than on the separation between us and 
any other race in the world ; in the same way Lord 
Lyndhurst, in words long famous, called the Irisl), 
" aliens in speech, in religion, in blood." This natu- 
rally created a profound sense of estrangement ; 
it doubled the estrangement which political and 
religious differences already made between us and 
the Irish : it seemed to make this estrangement 
immense, incurable, fatal. It begot a strange reluc- 
tance, as any one may see by reading the preface to 

first time the foundation of Celtic research was laid ; but the 
great philologist did not live to see the superstructure which 
never could have been raised but for him. Prichard was first to 
indicate the right path, and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, 
displayed his incomparable and masterly sagacity as usual, but 
for want of any trustworthy record of Celtic words and forms to 
work upon, the truth remained concealed or obscured until the 
publication of the Gravimatica Celtica. Dr. Arnold, a man of 
the past generation, who made more use of the then uncertain and 
unfixed doctrines of comparative philology in his historical 
writings than is done by the present generation in the fullest 
noonday light of the Vergkichende Gravwiatik, was thus justified 
in his view by the philology of the period, to which he merely 
gave an enlarged historical expression. The prime fallacy then 
as now, however, was that of antedating the distinction betAveen 
Gaelic and Cymric Celts." 



( 19 ) 

the great text-book for Welsh poetry, the Myvyrian 
Archceology, published at the beginning of this 
century, to further, — nay, allow, — even among quiet, 
peaceable people like the Welsh, the publication of 
the documents of their ancient literature, the monu- 
ments of the Cymric genius ; such was the sense of 
repulsion, the sense of Incompatibility, of radical 
antagonism, making it seem dangerous to us to let 
such opposites to ourselves have speech and utter- 
ance. Certainly the Jew, — the Jew of ancient times, at 
least, — then seemed a thousand degrees nearer than 
the Celt to us. Puritanism had so assimilated Bible 
ideas and phraseology ; names like Ebenezer, and 
notions like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so 
natural to us, that the sense of affinity between the 
Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong ; 
a steady, middle -class Anglo-Saxon much more 
imagined himself Ehud's cousin than Ossian's. But 
meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of the 
ethnologists about the true natural grouping of the 
human race, the doctrine of a great Indo-European 
unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, 
Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on 
the other hand, of a Semitic unity and of a Mon- 



( 20 ) 

golian unity, separated by profound distinguishing 
marks from the Indo-European unity and from one 
another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popu- 
larising itself. So strong and real could the sense 
of sympathy or antipathy, grounded upon real 
identity or diversity in race, grow in men of culture, 
that we read of a genuine Teuton, — Wilhelm von 
Humboldt, — finding, even in the sphere of religion, 
that sphere where the might of Semltism has been 
so overpowering, the food which most truly suited 
his spirit in the productions not of the alien Semitic 
genius, but of the genius of Greece or India, the 
Teuton's born kinsfolk of the common Indo- 
European family. " Towards Semltism he felt him- 
self," we read, " far less drawn ; " he had the 
consciousness of a certain antipathy in the depths of 
his nature to this, and to its " absorbing, tyrannous, 
terrorist religion," as to the opener, more flexible 
Indo - European genius, this religion appeared. 
" The mere workings of the old man in him ! " 
Semltism will readily reply ; and though one can 
hardly admit this short and easy method of settling 
the matter, it must be owned that Humboldt's is an 
extreme case of Indo-Europeanism, useful as letting 



( 21 ) 

US see what may be the power of race and primitive 
constitution, but not Hkely, In the spiritual sphere, 
to have many companion cases equalHng It. Still, 
even in this sphere, the tendency is in Humboldt's 
direction ; the modern spirit tends more and more 
to establish a sense of native diversity between our 
European bent and the Semitic bent, and to elimi- 
nate, even in pur religion, certain elements as purely 
and excessively Semitic, and therefore, in right, not 
combinable with our European nature, not assimil- 
able by it. This tendency is now quite visible even 
among ourselves, and even, as I have said, within 
the great sphere of the Semitic genius, the sphere of 
religion ; and for its justification this tendency appeals 
to science, the science of origins ; It appeals to this 
science as teaching us which way our natural affini- 
ties and repulsions He. It appeals to this science, 
and In part It comes from It ; it Is, in considerable 
part, an Indirect practical result from it. 

In the sphere of politics, too, there has. In the 
same way, appeared an Indirect practical result from 
this science ; the sense of antipathy to the Irish people, 
of radical estrangement from them, has visibly abated 
amongst all the better part of us ; the remorse for 



( 22 ) 

past ill-treatment of them, the wish to make amends, 
to do them justice, to fairly unite, if possible, in one 
people with them, has visibly increased ; hardly a 
book on Ireland is now published, hardly a debate 
on Ireland now passes in Parliament, without this 
appearing. Fanciful as the notion may at first seem, 
I am inclined to think that the march of science, — ( 
science insisting that there is no such original chasm 
between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popu- 
larly imagined, that they are not truly, what Lord 
Lyndhurst called them, aliens in blood from us, that 
they are our brothers in the great Indo-European 
family, -4-has had a share, an appreciable share, in 
producing this changed state of feeling. No doubt, 
the release from alarm and struggle, the sense of 
firm possession, solid security, and overwhelming 
power; no doubt these, allowing and encouraging 
humane feelings to spring up in us, have done much ; 
no doubt a state of fear and danger, Ireland in 
hostile conflict with us, our union violently disturbed, 
might, while it drove back all humane feelings, make 
also the old sense of utter estrangement revive. 
Nevertheless, so long as such a malignant revolution 
of events does not actually come about, so long the 



( 23 ) 

new sense of kinship and kindliness lives, works, and 
gathers strength ; and the longer it so lives and 
works, the more it makes any such malignant revo- 
lution improbable. And this new, reconciling sense 
has, I say, its roots in science. 

However, on these indirect benefits of science 
we must not lay too much stress. Only this must 
be allowed ; it is clear that there are now in opera- 
tion two influences, both favourable to a more atten- 
tive and impartial study of Celtism than it has yet 
ever received from us. One is, the strengthening in 
us of the feeling of Indo-Europeanism ; the other, 
the strengthening in us of the scientific sense gene- 
rally. The first breaks down barriers between us 
and the Celt, relaxes the estrangement between 
us ; the second begets the desire to know his case 
thoroughly, and to be just to it. This is a very 
different matter from the political and social Celtisa- 
tion of which certain enthusiasts dream ; but it is 
not to be despised by any one to whom the Celtic 
genius is dear ; and it is possible, while the other 
is not. 



( 24 ) 



I. 



To know the Celtic case thoroughly, one must 
know the Celtic people ; and to know them, one must 
know that by which a people best express them- 
selves, — their literature. Few of us have any notion 
what a mass of Celtic literature is really yet extant 
and accessible. One constantly finds even very 
accomplished people, who fancy that the remains of 
Welsh and Irish literature are as inconsiderable by 
their volume, as, in their opinion, they are by their 
intrinsic merit ; that these remains consist of a few 
prose stories. In great part borrowed from the litera- 
ture of nations more civilised than the Welsh or 
Irish nation, and of some unintelligible poetry. As 
to Welsh literature, they have heard, perhaps, of the 
Black Book of Caermarthen, or of the Red Book of 
Hergest, and they imagine that one or two famous 
manuscript books like these contain the whole 
matter. They have no notion that, in real truth, to 
quote the words of one who Is no friend to the high 
pretensions of Welsh literature, but their most for- 
midable impugner, Mr. Nash : — " The Myvyrian 



( 25 ) - 

manuscripts alone, now deposited in the British 

Museum, amount to 47 volumes of poetry, of various 

sizes, containing about 4,700 pieces of poetry, in 

16,000 pages, besides about 2,000 englynion or 

epigrammatic stanzas. There are also, in the same 

collection, 53 volumes of prose, in about 15,300 

I pages, containing a great many curious documents 

"^ on various subjects. Besides these, which were pur- 

I chased of the widow of the celebrated Owen Jones, 

_5 the editor of the Myvyrian ArchcBology, there are a 

^ vast number of collections of Welsh manuscripts in 

1 London, and in the libraries of the gentry of the 

principality." The Myvyrian ArchcBology^ here 

I spoken of by Mr. Nash, I have already mentioned ; 

4^ he calls its editor, Owen Jones, celebrated ; he is not 

^ so celebrated but that he claims a word, in passing, 

^ from a professor of poetry. He was a Denbighshire 

^iad^sman, as we say in the north, born before the 

middle of last century, in that vale of Myvyr, 

which has given its name to his archaeology. From 

his childhood he had that passion for the old 

treasures of his country's literature, which to this 

day, as I have said, in the common people of 

Wales is so remarkable ; these treasures were 



( 26 ) 

unprinted, scattered, difficult of access, jealously 
guarded. '' More than once," says Edward Lhuyd, 
who in his Archceologia Britannica, brought out 
by him in 1707, would gladly have given them 
to the world, " more than once I had a promise 
from the owner, and the promise w^as afterwards 
retracted at the instigation of certain persons, 
pseudo-politicians, as I think, rather than men of 
letters." So. Owen Jones went up, a young man 
of nineteen, to London, and got employment in a 
furrier s shop in Thames Street ; for forty years, with 
a single object in view, he worked at his business ; 
and at the end of that time his object was won. 
He had risen in his employment till the business 
had become his own, and he was now a man of con- 
siderable means ; but those means had been sought 
by him for one purpose only, the purpose of his life, 
the dream of his youth,^ — the giving permanence and 
publicity to the treasures of his national literature. 
Gradually he got manuscript after manuscript tran- 
scribed, and at last, in 1801, he jointly with two 
friends brought out in three large volumes, printed 
in double columns, his Myvyrian Archcsology of 
Wales. The book is full of imperfections, it pre- 



( 27 ) 

sented Itself to a public which could not judge of its 
importance, and it brought upon its author, in his 
life-time, more attack than honour. He died not 
long afterwards, and now he lies buried in All- 
hallows Church, in London, with his tomb turned 
towards the east, away from the green vale of Clwyd 
and the mountains of his native Wales ; but his book 
is the great repertory of the literature of his nation, 
the comparative study of languages and literatures 
gains every day more followers, and no one of these 
followers, at home or abroad, touches Welsh litera- 
ture without paying homage to the Denbighshire 
peasant's name ; if the bards' glory and his own are 
still matter of moment to him, — si quid mentem 
nwrtalia tanguni, — he may be satisfied. 

Even the printed stock of early Welsh literature 
is, therefore, considerable, and the manuscript stock 
of it is very great indeed. Of Irish literature, the 
stock, printed and manuscript, is truly vast ; the work 
of cataloguing and describing this has been admir- 
ably performed by another remarkable man, who 
died only the other day, Mr. Eugene O' Curry. 
Obscure Scaliger of a despised literature, he deserves 
some weightier voice to praise him than the voice of 



( 28 ) 

an unlearned bellettristic trifler like me ; he belongs 
to the race of the giants In literary research and 
industry, — a race now almost extinct. Without a 
literary education, and impeded too, it appears, by 
much trouble of mind and Infirmity of body, he has 
accomplished such a thorough work of classification 
and description for the chaotic mass of Irish litera- 
ture, that the student has now half his labour saved, 
and needs only to use his materials as Eugene 
O'Curry hands them to him.,^ It was as a professor in 
the Catholic University In Dublin that O'Curry gave 
the lectures in which he has done the student this 
service ; it Is touching to find that these lectures, a 
splendid tribute of devotion to the Celtic cause, had 
no hearer more attentive, more sympathising, than a 
man, himself, too, the champion of a cause more 
interesting than prosperous, — one of those causes 
which please noble spirits, but do not please destiny, 
which have Cato's adherence, but not Heavens, — 
Dr. Newman. Eugene O'Curry, In these lectures 
of his, taking as his standard the quarto page of 
Dr. O' Donovan's edition of the Annals of the Four 
Masters (and this printed monument of one branch 
of Irish literature occupies by Itself, let me say In 



( 29 ) 

passing, seven large quarto volumes, containing 
4,215 pages of closely printed matter), Eugene 
O'Curry says, that the great vellum manuscript 
books belonging to Trinity College, Dublin, and to 
the Royal Irish Academy, — books with fascinating 
titles, the Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Lein- 
ster, the Book of Ballymote, the Speckled Book, the 
Book of Lecain, the Yellow Book of Lecain, — have, 
between them, matter enough to fill 1 1 ,400 of these 
pages ; the other vellum manuscripts in the library 
of Trinity College, Dublin, have matter enough to 
fill 8,200 pages more; and the paper manuscripts of 
Trinity College, and the Royal Irish Academy 
together, would fill, he says, 30,000 such pages more. 
The ancient laws of Ireland, the so-called Brehon 
laws, which a commission is now publishing, were 
not as yet completely transcribed when O'Curry 
wrote ; but what had even then been transcribed was 
sufficient, he says, to fill nearly 8,000 of Dr. O' Dono- 
van's pages. Here are, at any rate, materials enough 
with a vengeance. These materials fall, of course, 
into several divisions. The most literary of these 
divisions, the Tales, consisting of Historic Tales and 
Imaginative Tales, distributes the contents of its 



( 30 ) 

Historic Tales as follows : — Battles, voyages, sieges, 
tragedies, cow-spoils, courtships, adventures, land- 
expeditions, sea-expeditions, banquets, elopements, 
loves, lake-irruptions, colonisations, visiftns. Of what 
a treasure-house of resources for the history of Celtic 
life and the Celtic genius does that bare list, even by 
itself, call up the image ! The Annals of the Four 
Masters give " the years of foundations and destruc- 
tions of churches and castles, the obituaries of 
remarkable persons, the inaugurations of kings, the 
battles of chiefs, the contests of clans, the ages 
of bards, abbots, bishops, &c." * Through other 
divisions of this mass of materials, — the books of 
pedigrees and genealogies, the martyrologies and 
festologies, such as the Felire of Angus the Culdee, 
the topographical tracts, such as the Dinnsenchas, — 
we touch '' the most ancient traditions of the Irish, 
traditions which were committed to writing at a 
period when the ancient customs of the people were 
unbroken." We touch " the early history of Ireland, 
civil and ecclesiastical." We get " the origin and 



* Dr. O'Conor in his Catalogue of the Stoive MSS. (quoted 
by O'Ciirry). 



( 31 ) 

history of the countless monuments of Ireland, of 
the ruined church and tower, the sculptured cross, 
the holy well, and the commemorative name of 
almost every townland and parish In the whole 
island." We get, In short, "the most detailed Infor- 
mation upon almost every part of ancient Gaelic 
life, a vast quantity of valuable details of life and 
manners."* 

And then, besides, to our knowledge of the 
Celtic genius, Mr. N orris has brought us from 
Cornwall, M. de la VIllemarqu6 from Brittany, 
contributions, Insignificant indeed In quantity, 
if one compares them with the mass of the 
Irish materials extant, but far from insignificant in 
value. 

We want to know what all this mass of docu- 
ments really tells us about the Celt. But the mode 
of dealing with these documents, and with the whole 
question of Celtic antiquity, has hitherto been most 
unsatisfactory. Those who have dealt with them, 
have gone to work, in general, either as warm LCelt- 
lovers or as warm Celt-hatersJ and not as dls- 

* O'Curry. 




( 32 ) 

interested students of an important matter of 
science. One party seems to set out with the 
determination to find everything in Celtism and its 
remains ; the other, with the determination to find 
nothing in them. A simple seeker for truth has a 
hard time between the two. An illustration or so 
will make clear what I mean. First let us take the 
Celt-lovers, who, though they engage one's sym- 
pathies more than the Celt-haters, yet, inasmuch as 
assertion is more dangerous than denial, show their 
weaknesses in a more signal way. A very learned 
man, the Rev. Edward Davies, published in the 
early part of this century two important books on 
Celtic antiquity. The second of these books. The 
Mythology and Rites of the B7ntish Druids, contains, 
with much other interesting matter, the charming 
story of Taliesin. Bryant's book on mythology was 
then in vogue, and Bryant, in the fantastical manner 
so common in those days, found in Greek mythology 
what he called an arkite idolatry, pointing to Noah's 
deluge and the ark. Davies wishing to give dignity 
to his Celtic mythology, determines to find the arkite 
idolatry there too, and the style in which he proceeds 
to do this affords a good specimen of the extra va- 



( 33 ) 

gance which has caused Celtic antiquity to be looked 
upon with so much suspicion. The story of Taliesin 
begins thus : — 

" In former times there was a man of noble 
descent in Penllyn. His name was Tegid Voel, 
and his paternal estate was in the middle of the 
Lake of Tegid, and his wife was called Ceridwen." 

Nothing could well be simpler ; but what Davies 
finds in this simple opening of Taliesin's story, is 
prodigious : — 

'' Let us take a brief view of the proprietor of 
this estate. Tegid Vohel — bald serenity — presents 
itself at once to our fancy. The painter would find 
no embarrassment in sketching the portrait of this 
sedate venerable personage, whose crown is partly 
stripped of its hoary honours. But of all the gods 
of antiquity, none could with propriety sit for this 
picture excepting Saturn, the acknowledged repre- 
sentative of Noah, and the husband of Rhea, which 
was but another name for Ceres, the genius of the ark." 

And Ceres, the genius of the ark, is of course 
found in Ceridwen, " the British Ceres, the arkite 
goddess who initiates us into the deepest mysteries 
of the arkite superstition." 



( 34 ) 

Now the story of Taliesin, as it proceeds, exhibits 
Ceridwen as a sorceress ; and a sorceress, Hke a 
goddess, belongs to the world of the supernatural ; 
but, beyond this, the story itself does not suggest 
one particle of relationship between Ceridwen and 
Ceres. All the rest comes out of Davies's fancy, 
and is established by reasoning of the force of that 
about " bald serenity." 

It is not difficult for the other side, the Celt- 
haters, to get a triumph over such adversaries as 
these. Perhaps I ought to ask pardon of Mr. Nash, 
whose Taliesin it is impossible to read without profit 
and instruction, for classing him among the Celt- 
haters ; his determined scepticism about Welsh 
antiquity seems to me, however, to betray a precon- 
ceived hostility, a bias taken beforehand, as unmis- 
takable as Mr. Davies's prepossessions. But Mr. 
Nash is often very happy in demolishing, for really 
the Celt-lovers seem often to try to lay themselves 
open, and to invite demolition. Full of his notions 
about an arkite idolatry and a Helio-dsemonic wor- 
ship, Edward Davies gives this translation of an old 
Welsh poem, entitled The Panegyric of Lhidd the 
Great: — 



( 35 ) 

*' A song of dark import was composed by the 
distinguished Ogdoad, who assembled on the day of 
the moon, and went in open procession. On the 
day of Mars they allotted wrath to their adversaries ; 
on the day of Mercury they enjoyed their full pomp; 
on the day of Jove they were delivered from the 
detested usurpers ; on the day of Venus, the day of 
the great influx, they swam in the blood of men;''' 
on the day of the Sun there truly assemble five 
ships and five hundred of those who make supplica- 
tion : O Brithi, O Brithoi ! O son of the compacted 
wood, the shock overtakes me ; we all attend on 
Adonai, on the area of Pwmpai." 

That looks Helio-daemonic enough, undoubtedly; 
especially when Davies prints O Brithi, O Brithoi ! 
in Hebrew characters, as being '' vestiges of sacred 
hymns in the Phoenician language." But then 
comes Mr. Nash, and says that the poem is a 
middle - age composition, with nothing Helio- 
daemonic about it ; that it is meant to ridicule the 
monks ; and that O Brithi, O Brithoi ! is a mere 



* Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting in 
the manuscript. 

3-2 



( 36 ) 

piece of unintelligible jargon in mockery of the 
chants used by the monks at prayers ; and he gives 
this counter-translation of the poem : — - 

" They make harsh songs ; they note eight 
numbers. On Monday they will be prying about. 
On Tuesday they separate, angry with their adver- 
saries. On Wednesday they drink, enjoying them- 
selves ostentatiously. On Thursday they are in the 
choir; their poverty is. disagreeable. Friday is a 
day of abundance, the men are swimming in 
pleasures. On Sunday, certainly, five legions and 
five hundreds of them, they pray, they make excla- 
mations : O Brithi, Brithoi ! Like wood-cuckoos in 
noise they will be, every one of the idiots banging 
on the ground." 

As one reads Mr. Nash's explanation and trans- 
lation after Edward Davies's, one feels that a flood 
of the broad daylight of common-sense has been 
suddenly shed over the Panegyric 07i Lhcdd the 
Great, and one is very grateful to Mr. Nash. 

Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, 
has bewildered us with his fancies, as uncritical as 
Edward Davies's; with his neo-Druidism, his Mithriac 
heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the mysteries ; 



( Z7 ) 

and, above all, his ape of the sanctuary, " signifying 
the mercurial principle, that strange and unexplained 
disgrace of paganism," Mr. Nash comes to our 
assistance, and is most refreshingly rational. To 
confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only. 
Mr. Herbert constructs his monster, — to whom, he 
says, " great sanctity, together with foul crime, decep- 
tion, and treachery," is ascribed, — out of four lines of 
old Welsh poetry, of which he adopts the following 
translation : — 

" Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, 
without the mundane rampart, the world will become 
desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to convene the 
appointed dance over the green." 

One is not very clear what all this means, but it 
has, at any rate, a solemn air about it, which pre- 
pares one for the development of its first-named 
personage, the ape, into the mystical ape of the 
sanctuary. The cow, too,— says another famous 
Celt-lover, Dr. Owen, the learned author of the 
Welsh Dictionary, — the cow (henfon) is the cow of 
transmigration ; and this also sounds natural enough. 
But Mr. Nash, who has a keen eye for the piecing 
which frequently happens in these old fragments, 



( 38 ) 

has observed that just here, where the ape of the 
sanctuary and the cow of transmigration make their 
appearance, there seems to come a cluster of adages, 
popular sayings ; and he at once remembers an 
adage preserved with the word henfon in it, where, 
as he justly says, " the cow of transmigration cannot 
very well have place." This adage, rendered 
literally in English, is : " Whoso owns the old cow, 
let him go at her tail ;" and the meaning of it, 
as a popular saying, is clear and simple enough. 
With this clue, Mr. Nash examines the whole 
passage, suggests that heb eppa, " without the ape," 
with which Mr. Herbert begins, in truth belongs to 
something going before and is to be translated some- 
what differently ; and, in short, that what we really 
have here is simply these three adages one after 
another : " The first share is the full one. Polite- 
ness is natural, says the ape. Without the cow-stall 
there would be no dung-heap." And one can hardly 
doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right. 

Even friends of the Celt, who are perfectly in- 
capable of extravagances of this sort, fall too often 
into a loose mode of criticism concerning him and 
the documents of his history, which is unsatisfactory 



( 39 ) 

In itself, and also gives an advantage to his many 
enemies. One of the best and most delightful 
friends he has ever had, — M. de la Villemarque, — 
has seen clearly enough that often- the alleged 
antiquity of his documents cannot be proved, that it 
can be even disproved, and that he must rely onT 
other supports than this to establish what he wants ; 
yet one finds him saying : '' I open the collection of 
Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century. 
Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,". . . and so on. 
But his adversaries deny that we have really any 
such thing as a '' collection of Welsh bards from the 
sixth to the tenth century," or that a " Taliesin, one 
of the oldest of them," exists to be quoted in defence 
of any thesis. Sharon Turner, again, whose Vindi- 
cation of the Ancient British Poen^s was prompted, 
it seems to me, by a critical instinct at bottom sound, 
is weak and uncritical in details like this : '' The 
strange poem of Taliesin, called the Spoils of 
Annwn, implies the existence (in the sixth century, 
he means) of mythological tales about Arthur ; and 
the frequent allusion of the old Welsh bards to the 
persons and incidents which we find in the Mabino- 
gio7i, are further proofs that there must have been 



( 40 ) 

such stories in circulation amongst the Welsh." But 
the critic has to show, against his adversaries, that 
the Spoils of Annw7i is a real poem of the sixth 
century, with a real sixth-century poet called Taliesin 
for its author, before he can use it to prove what 
Sharon Turner there wishes to prove ; and, in like 
manner, the high antiquity of persons and incidents 
that are found in the manuscripts of the Mabinogion, 
— manuscripts written, like the famous Red Book of 
Hergest, in the library of Jesus College at Oxford, in 
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, — is not proved 
by allusions of the old Welsh bards, until (which is 
just the question at issue) the pieces containing these 
allusions are proved themselves to possess a very 
high antiquity. In the present state of the question 
as to the early Welsh literature, this sort of reason- 
ing is inconclusive and bewildering, and merely 
carries us round in a circle. Again, it is worse than 
inconclusive reasoning, it shows so uncritical a spirit 
that it begets grave mistrust, when Mr. Williams ab 
Ithel, employed by the Master of the Rolls to edit the 
Brut y Tywysogion, the " Chronicle of the Princes," 
says in his introduction, in many respects so useful 
and interesting : *' We may add, on the authority of 



( 41 ) 

a scrupulously faithful antiquary, and one that was 
deeply versed in the traditions of his order — the late 
lolo Morgan wg — that King Arthur in his Institutes 
of the Round Table introduced the age of the world 
for events which occurred before Christ, and the 
. year of Christ's nativity for all subsequent events." 
Now, putting out of the question lolo M organ wg's 
character as an antiquary, it is obvious that no one, 
not Grimm himself, can stand in that way as "autho- 
rity " for King Arthur's having thus regulated chrono- 
logy by his Institutes of the Round Table, or even 
for there ever having been any such institutes at all. 
And finally, greatly as I respect and admire Mr. 
Eugene O'Curry, unquestionable as is the sagacity, 
the moderation, which he in general unites with his 
immense learning, I must say that he, too, like his 
brother Celt-lovers, sometimes lays himself danger- 
ously open. For instance, the Royal Irish Academy 
possesses In its Museum a relic of the greatest value, 
the Domhnach Airgid, a Latin manuscript of the 
four gospels. The outer box containing this manu- 
script is of the 14th century, but the manuscript 
itself, says O'Curry (and no man is better able to 
judge) is certainly of the 6th. This is all very well. 



( 42 ) 

" But," O'Curry then goes on, " I believe no reason- 
able doubt can exist that the Domhnach Airgid 
was actually sanctified by the hand of our great 
Apostle." One has a thrill of excitement at 
recelvlnor this assurance from such a man as Eugene 
O' Curry ; one believes that he Is really going to 
make It clear that St. Patrick did actually sanctify 
the Domluiach Airgid with his own hands; and one 
reads on : — 

'' As St. Patrick, says an ancient life of St. Mac 
Carthainn preserved by Colgan in his Ac^a San- 
torum Hibei^nicE, was on his way from the north, 
and coming to the place now called Clogher, he 
was carried over a stream by his strong man, Bishop 
Mac Carthainn, who, while bearing the Saint, groaned 
aloud, exclaiming : ' Ugh I Ugh ! ' 

" ' Upon my good word,' said the Saint, ' it was 
not usual with you to make that noise.' 

*' ' I am now old and infirm,' said Bishop Mac 
Carthainn, ' and all my early companions in mission- 
work you have settled down in their respective 
churches, while I am still on my travels.' 

" ' Found a church then,' said the Saint, ' that 
shall not be too near us (that Is to his own Church 



I 



( 43 ) 

of Armagh) for familiarity, nor too far from us for 
intercourse.' 

" And the Saint then left Bishop Mac Carthainn 
there, at Clogher, and bestowed the Domhnach 
Air Old upon him, which had been given to Patrick 
from heaven, when he was on the sea, coming to 
Erin." 

The legend is full of poetry, full of humour ; and 
one can quite appreciate, after reading it, the tact 
which gave St. Patrick such a prodigious success in 
organising the primitive church in Ireland ; the new 
bishop, '' not too near us for familiarity, nor too far 
from us for intercourse," is a masterpiece. But how 
can Eugene O'Curry have imagined that it takes no 
more than a legend like that, to prove that the 
particular manuscript now in the Museum of the 
Royal Irish Academy was once in St. Patrick's 
pocket ? 

I insist upon extravagances like these, not in 
order to throw ridicule upon the Celt-lovers,^ — on the 
contrary, I feel a greal deal of sympathy with them, 
— but rather, to make it clear what an immense 
advantage the Celt-haters, the negative side, have in 
the controversy about Celtic antiquity ; how much a 



( 44 ) 

clear-headed sceptic, like Mr. Nash, may utterly 
demolish, and, in demolishing, give himself the 
appearance of having won an entire victory. But an 
entire victory he has, as I will next proceed to show, 
by no means won. 



II. 

I said that a sceptic like Mr. Nash, by demolishing 
the rubbish of the Celtic antiquaries, might often give 
himself the appearance of having won a complete 
victory, but that a complete victory he had, in truth, 
by no means won. He has cleared much rubbish 
away, but this Is no such very difficult feat, and 
requires mainly common-sense ; to be sure, Welsh 
archaeologists are apt to lose their common-sense, but 
at moments when they are In possession of it they 
can do the indispensable, negative part of criticism, 
not, Indeed, so briskly or cleverly as Mr. Nash, but 
still well enough. Edward Davles, for Instance, has 
quite clearly seen that the alleged remains of old 
Welsh literature are not to be taken for genuine 
just as they stand : '' Some petty and mendicant 
minstrel, who only chaunted It as an old song, has 



( 45 ) 

tacked on " (he says of a poem he is discussing) 
" these Hnes, in a style and measure totally different 
from the preceding verses : ' May the Trinity grant 
us mercy in the day of judgment : a liberal donation, 
good gentlemen ! ' " There, fifty years before, Mr. 
Nash, is a clearance very like one of Mr. Nash's. 
But the difficult feat in this matter is the feat of 
construction ; to determine when one has cleared 
away all that is to be cleared away, what is the 
significance of that which is left ; and here, I 
confess, I think Mr. Nash and his fellow-sceptics, 
who say that next to nothing is left, and that the 
significance of whatever is left is next to nothing, 
dissatisfy the genuine critic even more "than Edward 
Davies and his brother enthusiasts, who have a 
sense that something primitive, august, and interest- 
ing is there, though they fail to extract it, dissatisfy 
him. There is a very edifying story told by O' Curry 
of the effect produced on Moore, the poet, who had 
undertaken to write the history of Ireland (a task 
for which he was quite unfit), by the contemplation 
of an old Irish manuscript. Moore had, without 
knowing anything about them, spoken slightingly 
of the value to the historian of Ireland of the 



( 46 ) 

materials afforded by such manuscripts ; but, says 
O' Curry : — 

" In the year 1839, during one of his last visits 
to the land of his birth, he, in company with his old 
and attached friend Dr. Petrie, favoured me with an 
unexpected visit at the Royal Irish Academy. I 
was at that period employed on the Ordnance Survey 
of Ireland, and at the time of his visit happened to 
have before me on my desk the Books of Ballymote 
and Lecain^ The Speckled Book, The Annals of the 
Four Masters, and many other ancient books, for 
historical research and reference. I had never before 
seen Moore, and after a brief introduction and expla- 
nation of the nature of my occupation by Dr. Petrie, 
and seeing the formidable array of so many dark and 
time-worn volumes by which I was surrounded, he 
looked a little disconcerted, but after a while plucked 
up courage to open the Book of Ballymote and ask 
what it was. Dr. Petrie and myself then entered 
into a short explanation of the history and character 
of the books then present as well as of ancient Gaed- 
helic documents in general. Moore listened with 
great attention, alternately scanning the books and 
myself, and then asked me, in a serious tone, if I 



( 47 ) 

understood them, and how I had learned to do so. 
Having satisfied him upon these points, he turned to 
Dr. Petrle and said : — ' Petrle, these huge tomes 
could not have been written by fools or for any 
foolish purpose. I never knew anything about 
them before, and I had no right to have undertaken 
the History of He land.' " 

And from that day Moore, It is said, lost all 
heart for going on with his History of Ireland, 
and It was only the Importunity of the publishers 
which Induced him to bring out the remaining 
volume. 

jCoidd not have bee7i luritten by fools, or for any 
foolish purpose. ^ That Is, I am convinced, a true 
presentiment to have In one's mind when one looks 
at Irish documents like the Book of Ballymote, or 
Welsh documents like the Red Book of Herges t. In 
some respects, at any rate, these documents are what 
they claim to be, they hold what they pretend to 
hold, they touch that primitive world of which they 
profess to be the voice. The true critic is he who 
can detect this precious and genuine part In them, 
and employ it for the elucidation of the Celt's genius 
and history, and for any other fruitful purposes to 



( 48 ) 

which it can be applied. Merely to point out the 
mixture of what is late and spurious in them, is to 
touch but the fringes of the matter. In reliance upon 
the discovery of this mixture of what is late and 
spurious in them, to pooh-pooh them altogether, to 
treat them as a heap of rubbish, a mass of middle- 
age forgeries, is to fall into the greatest possible 
error. Granted that all the manuscripts of Welsh 
poetry (to take that branch of Celtic literature which 
has had, in Mr. Nash, the ablest disparager), granted 
that all such manuscripts that we possess are, with 
the most 'insignificant exception, not older than the 
twelfth century; granted that the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries were a time of great poetical 
activity in Wales, a time when a mediaeval literature 
flourished there, as it flourished in England, France, 
and other countries ; granted that a great deal, of 
what Welsh enthusiasts have attributed to their 
great traditional poets of the sixth century belongs 
to this later epoch, — what then ? Does that get rid 
of the great traditional poets, — the Cynveirdd or old 
bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and their 
compeers, — does that get rid of the great poetical 
tradition of the sixth century altogether ; does it 



( 49 ) 

merge the whole literary antiquity of Wales in her 
mediaeval literary Antiquity, or, at least, reduce all 
other than this to insignificance ? Mr. Nash says 
it does ; all his efforts are directed to show how much 
of the so-called sixth-century pieces may be resolved 
into mediaeval, twelfth-century work ; his grand 
thesis is that there is nothing primitive and pre- 
Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of 
the Druidism and Paganism every one associates 
with Celtic antiquity ; all this, he says, was 
extinguished by PauHnus in a. d. 59, and never 
resuscitated. " At the time the Mabinogion and the 
Taliesin ballads were composed, no tradition or 
popular recollection of the Druids or the Druidical 
mythology existed in Wales. The Welsh bards 
knew of no older mystery, nor of any mystic creed, 
unknown to the rest of the Christian world." And 
Mr. Nash complains that '' the old opinion that the 
Welsh poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan 
superstitions of a remote origin " should still find 
promulgators ; what we find in them is only, he 
says, what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth 
century, and '' one great mistake in these investiga- 
tions has been the supposing that the Welsh of the 

4 



( 50 ) 

twelfth, or even of the sixth century, were wiser as 
well as more Pagan than their neighbours." 

Why, what a wonderful thing is this ! We have, 
in the first place, the most weighty and explicit 
testimony, — Strabo's, Caesar's, Lucan's, — that this race 
once possessed a special, profound, spiritual discipline, 
that they were, to use Mr. Nash's words, " wiser than 
their neighbours." Lucan's words are singularly 
clear and strong, and serve well to stand as a land- 
mark in this controversy, in which one is sometimes 
embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on this 
side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely 
w^hat they say, how much or how little ; Lucan, 
addressing those hitherto under the pressure of 
Rome, but now left by the Roman civil war to their 
own devices, says : — 

'' Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises per^ 
petuate the memory of the fallen brave, without 
hindrance poured forth your strains. And ye, }'e 
Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once 
more your barbaric rites and weird solemnities. To 
you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever 
it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven ; your 
dwelling: is in the lone heart of the forest. From 



I 



( 51 ) 

you we learn, that the bourne of man's ghost Is not 
the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch 
below ; in another world his spirit survives still ; — 
death, if -your lore be true, is but the passage to 
enduring life." 

There is the testimony of an educated Roman, 
fifty years after Christ, to the Celtic race being then 
" wiser than their neighbours ; V testimony all the 
more remarkable because civilised nations, though 
very prone to ascribe to barbarous people an ideal 
purity and simplicity of life and manners, are by no 
means naturally inclined to ascribe to them high 
attainment in intellectual and spiritual things. And 
now, along with this testimony of Lucan's, one has 
to carry in mind Csesar s remark, that the Druids, 
partly from a religious scruple, partly from a desire 
to discipline the memory of their pupils, committed 
nothing to writing. Well, then come the crushing 
defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the Roman 
conquest ; but the Celtic race subsisted here still, and 
any one can see that, while the race subsisted, the tra- 
ditions of a discipline such as that of which Lucan has 
drawn the picture were not likely to be so very speedily 
" extinguished." The withdrawal of the Romans, 

4—2 



( 52 ) 

the recovered independence of the native race here, 
the Saxon invasion, the struggle with the Saxons, 
were just the ground for one of those bursts of 
energetic national life and self-consciousness which 
find a voice in a burst of poets and poetry. Accord- 
ingly, to this time, to the sixth century, the universal 
Welsh tradition attaches the great group of British 
poets, Taliesin and his fellows. In the twelfth 
century there began for Wales, along with another 
burst of national life, another burst of poetry ; and 
this burst literary in the stricter sense of the word, — 
a burst which left, for the first time, written records. 
It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well as of 
itself, and therefore Mr. Nash wants to make it the 
real author of the whole poetry, one may say, of the 
sixth century, as well as its own. No doubt one 
cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the sixth 
century ; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth 
and succeeding centuries wrote it down ; no doubt 
they mixed and changed it a great deal in writing it 
down. But, since a continuous stream of testimony 
shows the enduring existence and influence among 
4he kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the 
sixth century to the twelfth, of an old national litera- 



( 53 ) 

ture, It seems certain that much of this must be 
traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, 
and the interesting thing is to trace it. It cannot be 
denied that there is such a continuous stream of 
testimony ; there is Gildas in the sixth century, 
Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the 
tenth ; in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before 
the new literary epoch began, we hear of Rhys ap 
Tudor having " brought with him from Brittany the 
system of the Round Table, which at home had 
become quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, 
with regard to minstrels and bards, as it had been at 
Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the Emperor Arthur, in 
the time of the sovereignty of the race of the Cymry 
over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands." 
Mr. Nash's own comment on this is : " We here see 
the introduction of the Arthurian romance from 
Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation the 
revival of music and poetry in North Wales ; " and 
yet he does not seem to perceive what a testimony 
is here to the reality, fulness, and subsistence of that 
primitive literature about which he is so sceptical. 
Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primi- 
tive literature absolutely abounds ; one can quote 



( 54 ) 

none better than that of Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus 
Cambrensis, as he Is usually called. Giraldus is an 
excellent authority, who knew well what he was 
writing about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and 
rhapsodists of his time as having in their possession 
" ancient and authentic books " in the Welsh lan- 
guage. The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, 
again, and the elaborate poetical organisation which 
we find, both in Wales and Ireland, existing from 
the very commencement of the mediaeval literary 
period in each, and to which no other mediaeval 
literature, so far as I know, shows at its first begin- 
nings anything similar, indicates surely, in these 
Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent tradition of 
an older poetical period of great development, and 
almost irresistibly connects itself in one's mind 
with the elaborate Druidic discipline which Caesar 
mentions. 

But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of 
the storied antiquity, forming as it were the back- 
ground to those mediaeval documents which in 
Mr. Nash's eyes pretty much begin and end with 
themselves, is to take, almost at random, a passage 
from such a tale as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the 



( 55 ) 

Mabiuogioji, — that charming collection, for which we 
owe such a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte 
Guest (to call her still by the name she bore when 
she made her happy entry into the world of letters), 
and which she so unkindly suffers to remain out of 
print. Almost every page of this tale points to 
traditions and personages of the most remote anti- 
quity, and is instinct with the very breath of the 
primitive world. Search is made for Mabon, the 
son of Modron, who was taken when three nights 
old from between his mother and the wall. The 
seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri ; the Ousel 
had lived long enough to peck a smith's anvil down 
to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of 
Mabon. " But there is a race of animals who were 
formed before me, and I will be your guide to them." 
So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre. 
The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood 
where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hun- 
dred branches, and then slowly decay down to a 
withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon. 
" But I will be your guide to the place where there 
is an animal which was formed before I was ; " and 
he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd. 



( 56 ) 

" When first I came hither," says the Owl, " the 
wide valley you see was a wooded glen. And a 
race of men came and rooted it up. And there 
grew a second wood ; and this wood is the third. 
My wings, are they not withered stumps?" Yet 
the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard 
of Mabon ; but he offered to be guide " to where is 
the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has 
travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy." The 
Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which 
he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not 
so much as a span high. He knew nothing of 
Mabon ; but there was a monster Salmon, into whom 
he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw, who might, 
perhaps, tell them something of him. And at last 
the Salmon of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon. 
" With every tide I go along the river upwards, 
until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and 
there have I found such wrong as I never found 
elsewhere." And the Salmon took Arthur's mes- 
sengers on his shoulders up to the wall of the prison 
in Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon. 

Nothing could better give that sense of primitive 
and pre-mediaeval antiquity which to the observer 



( 57 ) 

with any tact for these things is, I think, clearly 
perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they 
may have been written ; or better serve to check too 
absolute an acceptance of Mr. Nash's doctrine, — in 
some respects very salutary, — " that the common 
assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth 
century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory 
grounds." It is true, it has ; it is true, too, that, as 
he goes on to say, '' writers who claim for produc- 
tions actually existing only in manuscripts of the 
twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called 
upon to demonstrate the links of evidence, either 
internal or external, which bridge over this great 
intervening period of at least five hundred years." 
Then Mr. Nash continues : " This external evidence 
is altogether wanting." Not altogether, as we have 
seen ; that assertion is a little too strong. But I am 
content to let it pass, because it is true, that without 
internal evidence in this matter the external evidence 
would be of no moment. But when Mr. Nash con- 
tinues further : " And the internal evidence even of 
the so-called historic poems themselves, is, in some 
instances at least, opposed to their claims to an origin 
in the sixth century," and leaves the matter there, 



( 58 ) 

and finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfac- 
tory turn to give to the matter, and a lame and 
impotent conclusion to his chapter ; because the one 
interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what 
instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of 
these poems to a sixth-century origin, but in what 
instances it supports them, and what these sixth- 
century remains, thus established, signify. 

So again with the question as to the mythological 
import of these poems. Mr. Nash seems to me to 
have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit of a 
sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions, — 
often enough chimerical,— than in the spirit of a dis- 
interested man of science. " We find in the oldest 
compositions in the Welsh language no traces," he 
says, " of the Druids, or of a pagan mythology." 
He will not hear of there being, for instance, in 
these compositions, traces of the doctrine of the 
transmigration of souls, attributed to the Druids in 
such clear words by Caesar. He is very severe upon 
a German scholar, long and favourably known in 
this country, who has already furnished several 
contributions to our knowledge of the Celtic race, 
and of whose labours the main fruit has, I believe. 



( 59 ) 

not yet been given us, — Mr. Meyer. He is very 
severe upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the 
poems ascribed to Taliesin, '' a sacrificial hymn 
addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of god 
of the Sun." It is not for me to pronounce for or 
against this notion of Mr. Meyer's. I have not the 
knowledge which is needed in order to make one's 
suffrage in these matters of any value ; speaking 
merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess 
that allegory seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer's 
theories, a somewhat excessive part ; Arthur and his 
Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying 
solely the year with its twelve months ; Percival and 
the Miller signifying solely steel and the grindstone ; 
Stonehenge and the Gododin put to purely calen- 
darial purposes ; the Nibelungen, the Mahabharata, 
and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the 
Gododin ; all this appears to me, I will confess, a 
little prematurely grasped, a little unsubstantial. 
But that any one who knows the set of modern 
mythological science towards astronomical and solar 
myths, a set which has already justified itself in 
many respects so victoriously, and which is so irre- 
sistible that one can hardly now look up at the sun 



( 6o ) 

without having the sensations of a moth ; — that any 
one who knows this, should find in the Welsh 
remains no traces of mythology, is quite astounding. 
Why, the heroes and heroines of the old Cymric 
world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story ; 
Arthur is the Great Bear, his harp is the constel- 
lation Lyra ; Cassiopeia's chair is Llys Don, Don's 
Court ; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and the 
Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod ; Gwydion was 
Don's son, and the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion. 
With Gwydion is Math, the son of Mathonwy, the 
*' man of illusion and phantasy ; " and the moment 
one goes below the surface, — almost before one goes 
below • the surface, — all is illusion and phantasy, 
double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological im- 
port, in the world which all these personages inhabit. 
What are the three hundred ravens of Owen, and 
the nine sorceresses of Peredur, and the dogs of 
Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of Rhian- 
non, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained 
spell-bound for eighty years together listening to 
them ? What is the Avanc, the water-monster, of 
whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial 
speech, and her music, to this day preserve the 



( 6i ) - 

tradition ? What is Gwyn the son of Nudd, king 
of fairle, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg, or family of 
beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every 
first day of May, — the great feast of the sun among 
the Celtic peoples, — with Gwythyr, for the fair Cor- 
delia, the daughter of Lear ? What is the wonderful 
mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first 
of May foaled, and no one ever knew what became 
of the colt ? Who is the mystic Arawn, the king 
of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year with 
Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place ? 
These are no mediaeval personages ; they belong to 
an older, pagan, mythological world. The very first 
thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is 
how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging 
an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the 
secret ; he is like a peasant building his hut on the 
site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus ; he builds, but 
what he builds is full of materials of which he knows 
not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition 
merely ; — stones " not of this building," but of an 
older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. 
In the mediaeval stories of no Latin or Teutonic 
people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh. 



( 62 ) 

Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and 
Olwen, asks help at the hand of Arthur's warriors ; 
a list of these warriors is given, which fills I know 
not how many pages of Lady Charlotte Guest's 
book ; this list is a perfect treasure - house of 
mysterious ruins : — 

" Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham — (his domains 
were swallowed up by the sea, and he himself hardly 
escaped, and he came to Arthur, and his knife had 
this peculiarity, that from the time that he came 
there no haft would ever remain upon it, and ow^ng 
to this a sickness came over him, and he pined away 
during the remainder of his life, and of this he 
died). 

" Drem, the son of Dremidyd — (when the gnat 
arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see 
it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen 
Blathaon in North Britain). 

*' Kynyr Keinvarvawc — (when he was told he 
had a son born, he said to his wife : Damsel, if thy 
son be mine, his heart will be always cold, and there 
will be no warmth in his hands)." 

How evident, again, is the slightness of the 
narrator's hold upon the Twrch - Tr^vyth and his 



( 63 ) 

Strange story ! How manifest the mixture of known 
and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers 
and orders of tradition jumbled together, in the story 
of Bran the Blessed, a story whose personages touch 
a comparatively late and historic time. Bran invades 
Ireland, to avenge one of " the three unhappy blows 
of this island," the daily striking of Branwen by her 
husband Matholwch, King of Ireland. Bran is 
mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and only 
seven men of Britain, " the Island of the Mighty," 
escape, among them Taliesin : — 

" And Bran commanded them that they should 
cut off his head. And take you my head, said he, 
and bear it even unto the White Mount in London, 
and bury it there with the face towards France. 
And a long time will you be upon the road. In 
Harlech you will be feasting seven years, the birds 
of Rhiannon singing unto you the while. And all 
that time the head will be to you as pleasant com- 
pany as it ever was when on my body. i\.nd at 
Gwales in Penvro you will be fourscore years, and 
you may remain there, and the head with you un- 
corrupted, until you open the door that looks towards 
Aber Henvelen and towards Cornwall. And after 



( 64 ) 

you have opened that door, there you may no longer 
tarry; set forth then to London to bury the head, 
and go straight forward. 

"So they cut off his head, and those seven went 
forward therewith. And Branwen was the eighth 
with them, and they came to land at Aber Alaw In 
Anglesey, and they sate down to rest. And Branwen 
looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of 
the Mighty, to see If she could descry them. 'Alas,' 
said she, ' woe Is me that I was ever born ; two 
islands have been destroyed because of me.' Then 
she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart. 
And they made her a four-sided grave, and burled 
her upon the banks of the Alaw. 

" Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to 
feast and to drink there ; and there came three birds 
and began singing, and all the songs they had ever 
heard were harsh compared thereto ; and at this 
feast they continued seven years. Then they went 
to Gwales In Penvro, and there they found a fair 
and regal spot overlooking the ocean, and a spacious 
hall was therein. And they went into the hall, and 
two of Its doors were open, but the third door was 
closed, that which looked towards Cornwall. ' See 



( 65 ) X 

yonder,' said Manawyddan, ' is the door that we 
may not open.' And that night they regaled them- 
selves and were joyful. And there they remained 
fourscore years, nor did they, think they had ever 
spent a time more joyous and mirthful. And they 
were not more weary than when first they came, 
neither did they, any of them, know the time they 
had been there. And it was as pleasant to them 
having the head with them as if Bran had been with 
them himself. 

*' But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn : 
' Evil betide me if I do not open the door to know 
if that is true which is said concerning it' So he 
opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and 
Aber Henvelen. And when they had looked, they 
were as conscious of all the evils they had ever 
sustained, and of all the friends and companions 
they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen 
them, as if all had happened in that very spot ; and 
especially of the fate of their lord. And because of 
their perturbation they could not rest, but journeyed 
forth with the head towards London. And they 
buried the head in the White Mount." 

Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confi- 

5 



( 66 ) 

dence, disinterred the head, and this was one of 
*' the three unhappy disclosures of the island of 
Britain." 

There is evidently mixed here, with the newer 
legend, a detritus, as the geologists would say, of 
something far older; and the secret of Wales and its 
genius- is not truly reached until this detritus, instead 
of being called recent because it is found in contact 
with what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to 
tell its own story. 

But when we show him things of this kind in 
the Welsh remains, Mr. Nash has an answer for us. 
** Oh," he says, " all this is merely a machinery of 
necromancers and magic, such as has probably been 
possessed by all people in all ages, more or less 
abundantly. How similar are the creations of the 
human mind in times and places the most remote ! 
We see in this similarity only an evidence of the 
existence of a common stock of ideas, variously 
developed according to the formative pressure of 
external circumstances. The materials of these tales 
are not peculiar to the Welsh." And then Mr. 
Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity, 
how certain incidents of these tales have their 



( 67 ) 

counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in Oriental 
romance. He says, fairly enough, that the asser- 
tions of Taliesin, in the famous Hmies Taliesin, or 
History of Taliesin, that he was present with Noah 
in the Ark, at the Tower of < Babel, and with Alex- 
ander of Macedon, '' we may ascribe to the poetic 
fancy of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, 
who brought this romance into its present form. 
We may compare these statements of the universal 
presence of the wonder-working magician with those 
of the gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metri- 
cal tale called the Tra-deller s Song!' No doubt, 
lands the most distant can be shown to have a 
common property in many marvellous stories. This 
is one of the most interesting discoveries of modern 
science ; but modern science is equally interested in 
knowing how the genius of each people has differen- 
tiated, so to speak, this common property of theirs ; 
in tracking out, in each case, that special '' variety of 
development," which, to use Mr. Nash's own words, 
*' the formative pressure of external circumstances " 
has occasioned ; and not the formative pressure from 
without only, but also the formative pressure from 
within. It is this which he who deals with the 

5—2 



( 68 ) 

Welsh remains in a philosophic spirit wants to 
know. Where is the force, for scientific purposes, 
of telling us that certain incidents by which Welsh 
poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving 
tradition of the doctrine of transmigration, are found 
in Irish poetry also, when Irish poetry has, like 
Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said to 
have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly? 
Where is even the great force, for scientific purposes, 
of proving, if it were possible to prove, that the 
extant remains of Welsh poetry contain not one 
plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian 
doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton 
poetry such texts as this from the prophecy of 
Gwenchlan : " Three times must we all die, before 
we come to our final repose ? " or as the cry of the 
eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian 
blood, a cry in which the poet evidently gives vent 
to his own hatred ? since the solidarity, to use that 
convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh 
poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one 
may be almost certainly assumed not to have been 
wanting to those of the other. The question is, 
when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees : 



■ ( 69 ) 

'' I have been In many shapes before I attained a 
congenial form. I have been a narrow blade of a 
sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have been a 
shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have 
been a book in the beginning, I have been a light in 
a lantern a year and a half, I have been a. bridge for 
passing over three-score rivers ; I have journeyed as 
an eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been 
a director in battle, I have been a sword in the hand, 
I have been a shield in fight, I have been the string 
of a harp, I have been enchanted for a year in the 
foam of water. There is nothing in which I have 
not been," — the question is, have these " state- 
ments of the universal presence of the wonder- 
working magician " nothing which distinguishes 
them from " similar creations of the human mind in 
times and places the most remote ; " have they not 
an inwardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of 
tone, which indicates the. still reverberating echo of 
a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was 
Druidism ? Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. 
Nash invites us, with the gleeman of the Anglo- 
Saxon Traveller s Song. Take the specimen of this 
song which Mr. Nash himself quotes : '' I have 



( 70 ) 

been with the Israelites and with the Essyringi, 
with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with 
the Egyptians ; I have been with the Medes and 
with the Persians and with the Myrgings." It is 
very well to parallel with this extract Taliesin's : '' I 
carried the banner before Alexander ; I was in 
Canaan when Absalom was slain ; I was on the 
horse's crupper of Elias and Enoch ; I was on the 
high cross of the merciful Son of God ; I was the 
chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nim- 
rod ; I was with my King in the manger of the ass ; 
I supported Moses through the waters of Jordan ; I 
have been in the buttery in the land of the Trinity ; 
it is not known what is the nature of its meat and 
its fish." It is very Avell to say that these assertions 
* ' we may fairly ascribe to the poetic fancy of a 
Christian priest of the thirteenth century." Certainly 
we may ; the last of Taliesin's assertions more 
especially ; though one must remark at the same 
time that the Welshman shows much more fire and 
imagination than the Anglo-Saxon. But Taliesin 
adds, after his : "I was in Canaan when Absalom was 
slain," '' / luas in the hall of Don before Gwydion was 
born : " he adds, after : " I was chief overseer at the 



( 71 ) 

building of the tower of Nimrod," '' / have been three 
times resident in the castle of Arianrod ;'' he adds, 
after : " I was at the cross with Mary Magdalene," 
'' I obtained my inspiratio7i from the cauldron of 
Ceridwen!' And finally, after the mediaeval touch 
of the visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, 
he goes off at score : " I have been instructed in the 
whole system of the universe ; I shall be till the day 
of judgment on the face of the earth. I have been 
in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin, and the 
whirling round without motion between three ele- 
ments. Is it not the wonder of the world that 
cannot be discovered ? " And so he ends the poem. 
But here is the Celtic, the essential part of the 
poem : it is here that the " formative pressure " has 
been really in operation ; and here surely is paganism 
and mythology enough, which the Christian priest 
of the thirteenth century can have had nothing to 
do with. It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret 
this part as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do ; 
but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr. Nash 
does. Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be 
known without this part ; and the true critic is he 
who can best disengage its real significance. 



( 72 ) 

I say, then, what we want is to know the Celt 
and his genius ; not to exalt him or to abase him, but 
to know him. And for this a disinterested, positive, 
and constructive criticism is needed. Neither his 
friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of 
this. His friends have given us materials for criticism, 
" and for these we ought to be grateful ; his enemies 
have given us negative criticism, and for this, too, 
up to a certain point, we may be grateful ; but the 
criticism we really want neither of them has yet 
given us. 

Philology, however, that science which in our time 
has had so many successes, has not been abandoned 
by her good fortune in touching the Celt ; philology 
has brought, almost for the first time in their lives, 
the Celt and sound criticism together. The Celtic 
grammar of Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss 
to science, offers a splendid specimen of that patient, 
disinterested way of treating objects of knowledge, 
which is the best and most attractive characteristic 
of Germany. Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover 
nor as a Celt-hater ; not the slightest trace of a wish 
to glorify Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in 
his book. The only desire apparent there, is the 



I 



1 
i 



( 73 ) 

desire to know his object, the language of the Cehic 
peoples, as it really is. In this he stands, as a model 
to Celtic students ; and it has been given to him, as 
a reward for his sound method, to establish certain 
points which are henceforth cardinal points, land- 
marks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters, and 
which no one had so established before. People 
talked at random of Celtic writings of this or that 
age ; Zeuss has definitely fixed the age of what 
we actually have of these writings. To take the 
Cymric group of languages : our earliest Cornish 
document !s a vocabulary of the thirteenth cen- 
tury ; our earliest Breton document is a short 
description of an estate in a deed of the ninth 
century ; our earliest Welsh documents are Welsh 
glosses of the eighth century to Eutychus, the gram- 
marian, and Ovid's Art of Love, and the verses 
found by Edward Lhuyd in the Jtroejtcus manuscript 
at Cambridge. The mention of this Juvencus frag- 
ment, by-the-by, suggests the difference there is be- 
tween an interested and a disinterested critical habit. 
Mr. Nash deals with this fragment; but, in spite of 
all his great acuteness and learning, because he has 
a bias, because he does not bring to these matters 



( 74 ) 

the disinterested spirit they need, he is capable of 
getting rid, quite unwarrantably, of a particular 
word in the fragment which does not suit him ; his 
dealing with the verses is an advocate's dealing, 
not a critic's. Of this sort of thing Zeuss is in- 
capable. 

The test which Zeuss used for establishing the 
age of these documents is a scientific test, the test of 
orthography and of declensional and syntactical 
forms. These matters are far out of my province, 
but what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural 
attraction for us all, and one feels a pleasure in 
repeating it. It is the grand sign of age, Zeuss 
says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the 
grammarians call the " destitutio tenuium " has not 
yet taken place ; when the sharp consonants have 
not yet been changed into flat, p or t into b or d ; 
when, for instance, map, a son, has not yet become 
mab ; coet, a wood, coed; ocet, a harrow, oged. This 
is a clear, scientific test to apply, and a test of which 
the accuracy can be verified ; I do not say that 
Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or 
applied it, but I say that he is the first person who 
in dealing with Celtic matters has invariably pro- 



( 75 ) 

ceeded by means of this and similar scientific tests ; 
the first person, therefore, the body of whose work 
has a scientific, stable character ; and so he stands as 
a model to all Celtic inquirers. 

His influence has already been most happy; and 
as I have enlarged on a certain failure in criticism of 
Eugene O'Curry's, — whose business, after all, was 
the description and classification of materials rather 
than criticism, — let me show, by another example 
from Eugene O'Curry, this good influence of Zeuss 
upon Celtic studies. Eugene O'Curry wants to 
establish that compositions of an older date than the 
twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth 
century, and thus he proceeds. He takes one of the 
great extant Irish manuscripts, the Leabhar na 
Ji Uidhre ; or. Book of the Dun Cow. The compiler 
of this book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a 
member of the religious house of Cluainmacnois. 
This he establishes from a passage in the manuscript 
itself : " This is a trial of his pen here, by Mael- 
muiri, son of the son of Conn na m'Bocht." The 
date of Maelmuiri he establishes from a passage in 
the Annals of the Four Masters, under the year 
1106: ''Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na 



( 76 ) 

m'Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone 
church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers." 
Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow. 
This book contains an elegy on the death of St. 
Columb. Now, even before 1106, the language of 
this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make 
it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written 
between the lines. This gloss quotes, for the 
explanation of obsolete words, a number of more 
ancient compositions ; and these compositions, there- 
fore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth century, 
have been still in existence. Nothing can be 
sounder ; every step is proved, and fairly proved, as 
one goes along. O' Curry thus affords a good 
specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much 
wanted in Celtic researches, and so little practised 
by Edward Davies and his brethren ; and to found 
this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he sets 
in his own department of philology, has mainly 
contributed. 

Science's reconciling power, too, on which I have 
already touched, philology, in her Celtic researches, 
again and again illustrates. Races and languages 
have been absurdly joined, and unity has been often 



( n ) 

rashly assumed at stages where one was far, very 
far, from having yet really reached unity. Science 
has and will long have to be a divider and a sepa- 
ratist, breaking arbitrary and fanciful connections, 
and dissipating dreams of a premature and impos- 
sible unity. Still, science,— true science, — recognises 
in the bottom of her soul a law of ultimate fusion, 
of conciliation. To reach this, but to reach it legi- 
timately, she tends. She draws, for instance, towards 
the same idea which fills her elder and diviner sister, 
poetry, — the idea of the substantial unity of man ; 
though she draws towards it by roads of her own. 
But continually she is showing us affinity where we 
imagined there was isolation. What school-boy of 
us has not rummaged his Greek dictionary in vain 
for a satisfactory account of that old name for the 
Peloponnese, the Apian Land? and within the 
limits of Greek itself there is none. But the 
Scythian name for earth, '' apia," watery, water- 
issued, meaning first isle and then land — this name, 
which we find in '' avia," Scandin<3;W^, and in " ey " 
for Aldern^, not only explains the Apian Land of 
Sophocles for us, but points the way to a whole 
world of relationships of which we knew nothing. 



( 78 ) 

The Scythians themselves again, — obscure, far-sepa- 
rated Mongolian people as they used to appear to us, 
— when we find that they are essentially Teutonic and 
Indo-European, their very name the same word as 
the common Latin word "scutum," the shielded '^^o'^X^, 
what a surprise they give us ! And then, before we 
have recovered from this surprise we learn that the 
name of their father and god, Targitavus, carries us 
I know not how much further into familiar company. 
This divinity. Shining with the targe, the Greek 
Hercules, the Sun, contains in the second half of his 
name, tavus, " shining," a wonderful cement to hold 
times and nations together. Tavtis, '' shining," from 
" tava " — in Sanscrit, as well as Scythian, " to burn " 
or " shine," — is Divus, dies, Zeus, 0foc, Deva, and I 
know not how much more ; and Taviti, the bright 
and burnt, fire, the place of fire, the hearth, the 
centre of the family, becomes the family itself, just 
as our word family, the Latin familia, is frotn 
thymeU, the sacred centre of fire. The hearth comes 
to mean home. Then from home it comes to mean 
the group of homes, the tribe ; from the tribe the 
entire nation ; and in this sense of nation or people, 
the word appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and 



( 79 ) 

Persian, as well as in Scythian ; the Theuthisks, 
Deutschen, Tudesques, are the men of one theiUh, 
nation, or people ; and of this our name Germans 
itself is, perhaps, only the Roman translation, 
meaning the men of one germ or stock. The 
Celtic divinity, Teutates, has his name from the 
Celtic teuta, people ; taviti, fire, appearing here in 
its secondary and derived sense of people, just as it 
does in its own Scythian language in Targitavus's 
second name, Tavit-varus, TetUaros, the protector of 
the people. Another Celtic divinity, the Hesus of 
Lucan, finds his brother in the Gaisos, the sword, 
symbolising the god of battles of the Teutonic 
Scythians.'" And after philology has thus related to 

* See Les Scythes les Aficetres des Peuples Ger7naniques et Slaves, 
par F. G. Bergmann, professeur a la faculte des Lettres de Stras- 
bourg : Colmar, 1858. But Professor Bergmann's etymologies 
are often, says Lord Strangford, " false lights, held by an uncertain 
hand." And Lord Strangford continues : — " The Apian land 
certainly meant the watery land, Meer-umsc/ilungen, among the pre- 
Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the 
modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from 7}wre, the name 
for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the 
heart of the middle ages. But it is only connected by a remote 
and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with the avia of Scan- 
dinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for water. 



( 80 ) 

each other the Celt and the Teuton, she takes 
another branch of the Indo-European family, the 

which, if it had come do^vn to us in Gothic, would have been avi, 
genitive aiijos, and not a mere Latinised termination. Scythian 
is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our 
Indian, or the Turanian of modern ethnologists, used to compre- 
hend nomads and barbarians of all sorts and races north and east 
of the Black and Caspian seas. It is unsafe to connect their 
name with anything as yet ; it is quite as likely that it refers to 
the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our 
word to shoot, scebtan, skiutan, Lithuanian szau-ti. Some of the 
Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian ; 
some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as 
well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy 
this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the 
rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary. Coins, glosses, proper 
names, and inscriptions prove it. Targitaos (not -tavus) and the 
rest is guess-work or wrong. Herodotus's la^irX for the goddess 
Vesta is not connected with the root div whence Devas, Deus, &c., 
but the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl, 
topi (for tep or top), in modem Persian tab. Thymele refers to the 
hearth as the place of smoke {Qvis), tJms,fuimis), h\x\.fa??iitia denotes 
household from fa7nidiis for fagnndus, the root fag being equated 
with the Sansk. bhaj, servira. Lucan's Hesus or Esus may fairly 
be compared with the Welsh Hii Gadarn by legitimate process, 
but no letter-change can justify his connection ^^^th Gaisos, the 
spear, not the sword, Virgil's gcesum, A. S. gar, our verb to gore, 
retained in its outer form in gar-^'^. For Theuthisks, lege Thiiidisks, 
from thiuda, poptdus ; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, 
popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from 
the cultivated Latin ; hence the word Dutch, Deutsch. With our 



( 8i ) 

Sclaves, and shows us them as having the same 
name with the German Suevi, the solar people ; the 
common ground here, too, being that grand point of 
union, the sun, fire. So, also, we find Mr. Meyer, 
whose Celtic studies I just now mentioned, harping 
again and again on the connection even in Europe, 
if you go back far enough, between [Celt and 
German.' So, after all we have heard, and truly 
heard of the diversity between all things Semitic 
and all things Indo-European, there is now an 
Italian philologist at work upon the relationship 
between Sanscrit and Hebrew. 

Both in small and great things, philology, dealing 
with Celtic matters, has exemplified this tending of 
science towards unity. Who has not been puzzled 

ancestors thebd stood for nation generally and gethebde for any 
speech. • Our diet in the political sense is the same word, but 
borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our fathers. 
The modern Celtic form is the Irish timt/i, in ancient Celtic it 
must have been tetita, totita, of which we actually have the adjective 
toutius in thfe Gaulish inscription of Nismes. In Oscan we have 
it as turta, tuta, its adjective being handed down in Livy's ineddix 
tuticus, the mayor or chief magistrate of the tuta. In the Umbrian 
inscriptions it is tota. In Lithuanian tauta, the country opposed 
to the town, and in old Prussian tauta, the country generally, en 
Pjnisiskan taiitan, im. Land zu Prciisseji'' 

6 



( 82 ) 

by the relations of the Scots with Ireland — that 
vetus et 77tajor Scotia, as Colgan calls it ? Who does 
not feel what pleasure Zeuss brings us when he 
suggests that 6^<2^/, the name for the Irish Celt, and 
Scot, are at bottom the same word, both having 
their origin in a word meaning wind, and both sig- 
nifying the violent stormy people f" Who does not 
feel his mind agreeably cleared about our friends the 
Fenians, when he learns that the root of their name, 
fe7i, *' white," appears in the hero Fingal ; in 
Gwynned, the Welsh name for North Wales ; in 
the Roman Venedotia ; in Vannes in Brittany ; in 
Venice ? The very name of Ireland, some say, 
comes from the famous Sanscrit word Arya, the 
land of the Aryans, or noble men ; although the 
weight of opinion seems to be in favour of con- 
necting it rather with another Sanscrit word, avara, 
occidental, the western land or isle of the westf But, 

* Lord Strangford observes here: — "The original forms of 
Gael should be mentioned — Gaedil, Goidil : in modem Gaelic 
ordiography Gaoidheal where the dh is not realised in pronuncia- 
tion. There is nothing impossible in the connection of the root 
of this with that of Scot, if the s of the latter be merely prosthetic. 
But the whole thing is i?i nubibiis, and given as a guess only." 

f ^' The name of Erin," says Lord Strangford, "is treated at 



( 83 ) 

at any rate, who that has been brought up to think 
the Celts utter ahens from us and our culture, can 
come without a start of sympathy upon such words 
as heol (sol), or buaist (fuisti) ? or upon such a sen- 
tence as this, " Peris Dinu did funnaun " (" God 
prepared two fountains ") ? Or when Mr. Whitley 
Stokes, one of the very ablest scholars formed in 
Zeuss's school, a born philologist, — he now occupies, 
alas ! a post under the Government of India, instead 
of a chair of philology at home, and makes one think 
mournfully of Montesquieu's saying, that had he 
been an Englishman he should never have produced 
his great work, but have caught the contagion of 
practical life, and devoted himself to what is called 
*' rising in the world," — when Mr. Whitley Stokes, 
in his edition of Cormacs Glossary, holds up the 
Irish word traith, the sea, and makes us remark 
that, though the names Triton, Amphitrite, and 
those of corresponding Indian and Zend divinities, 
point to the meaning sea, yet it is only Irish which 

length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the ist series of 
Max Miiller's lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest tafigible 
form is shown to have been Iverio. Pictet's connection with Arya 
is quite baseless." 

6—2 



( 84 ) . 

actually supplies the vocable, how delightfully that 
brings Ireland into the Indo-European concert ! 
What a wholesome buffet it gives to Lord Lynd- 
hurst's alienation doctrines ! 

To go a little further. Of the two great Celtic 
divisions of language, the Gaelic and the Cymric, 
the Gaelic, say the philologists, is more related 
to the younger, more synthetic, group of languages, 
Sanscrit, Greek, Zend, Latin and Teutonic ; the 
Cymric to the older, more analytic Turanian 
group. Of the more synthetic Ar\^an group, 
again, Zend and Teutonic are, in their turn, looser 
and more analytic than Sanscrit and Greek, more 
in sympathy with the Turanian group and with 
Celtic. What possibilities of affinity and influence 
are here hinted at ; what lines of inquiry, worth 
exploring, at any rate, suggest themselves to one's 
mind. LBy the forms of its language a nation ex- 
presses its very self. _?Our language is the loosest^ 
the most analytic, of all European languages. And 
we, then, what are we ? what is England ? I will 
not answer, A vast obscure Cymric basis with a vast 
visible Teutonic superstructure ; but I will say that 
that answer sometimes suggests itself, at any rate, — 



( 85 ) 

sometimes knocks at our mind's door for admission ; 
and we begin to cast about and see whether it is to 
be let in. 

But the forms of its language are not our only- 
key to a people ; what it says in its language, its 
literature, is the great key, and we must get back to 
literature. The literature of the Celtic peoples has 
not yet had its Zeuss, and greatly it wants him. 
We need a Zeuss to apply to Celtic literature, to all 
its vexed questions of dates, authenticity, and sig- 
nificance, the criticism, the sane method, the disin- 
terested endeavour to get at the real facts, which 
Zeuss has shown in dealing with Celtic language. 
Science is good in itself, and therefore Celtic lite- 
rature, — the Celt-haters having failed to prove it 
a bubble, — Celtic literature is interesting, merely 
as an object of knowledge. But it reinforces and 
redoubles our interest in Celtic literature if we 
find that here, too, science exercises the reconciling, 
the uniting influence of which I have said so much ; 
if we find here, more than anywhere else, traces of 
kinship, and the most essential sort of kinship, 
spiritual kinship, between us and the Celt, of which 
we had never dreamed. I settle nothing, and can 



( 86 ) 

settle nothing ; I have not the special knowledge 
needed for that. I have no pretension to do more 
than to try and awaken interest ; to seize on hints, 
to point out indications, which, to any one with a 
feeling for literature, suggest themselves ; to stimu- 
late other inquirers. I must surely be without the 
bias which has so often rendered Welsh and Irish 
students extravagant ; why, my very name ex- 
presses that peculiar Semitico-Saxon mixture which 
makes the typical Englishman ; I can have no 
ends to serve in finding in Celtic literature more 
than is there. What is there, is for me the only 
question. 



III. 

We have seen how philology carries us towards 
ideas of affinity of race which are new to us. But it 
is evident that this affinity, even if proved, can be 
no very potent affair, unless it goes beyond the stage 
at which we have hitherto observed it. Affinity 
between races still, so to speak, in their mother's 
womb, counts for something, indeed, but cannot 



( 87 ) 

count for very much. So long as Celt and Teuton 
are in their embryo rudimentary state, or, at least, 
no such great while out of their cradle, still engaged 
in their wanderings, changes of place and struggle 
for development, so long as they have not yet 
crystallised into solid nations, they may touch and 
mix in passing, and yet very little come of it. It is 
when the embryo has grown and solidified into a 
distinct nation, into the Gaul or German of history, 
when it has finally acquired the characters which 
make the Gaul of history what he is, the German of 
history what he is, that contact and mixture are 
important, and may leave a long train of effects ; for 
Celt and Teuton by this time have their formed, 
marked, national, ineffaceable qualities to oppose or 
to communicate. The contact of the German of the 
Continent with the Celt was in the pre-historic times, 
and the definite German type, as we know it, w^as 
fixed later, and from the time when it became fixed 
was not influenced by the Celtic type. But here in 
our country, in historic times, long after the Celtic 
embryo had crystallised into the Celt proper, long 
after the Germanic embryo had crystallised into 
the German proper, there was an important contact 



( 88 ) 

between the two peoples ; the Saxons invaded the 
Britons and settled themselves in the Britons' country. 
Well, then, here was a contact which one might 
expect would leave its traces ; if the Saxons got the 
upper hand, as we all know they did, and made our 
country be England and us be English, there must 
yet, one would think, be some trace of the Saxon 
having met the Briton ; there must be some Celtic 
vein or other running through us. Many people say 
there is nothing at all of the kind, absolutely nothing ; 
the Saturday Review treats these matters of ethnology 
with great power and learning, and the Saturday 
Review says we are '' a nation into which a Norman 
element, like a much smaller Celtic element, was so 
completely absorbed that it is vain to seek after Nor- 
man or Celtic elements in any modern Englishman." 
And the other day at Zurich I read a long essay on 
English literature by one of the professors there, in 
which the writer observed, as a remarkable thing, 
that while other countries conquered by the Germans, 
— France, for instance, and Italy, — had ousted all 
German influence from their genius and literature, 
there were two countries, not originally Germanic, but 
conquered by the Germans, England and German 



( 89 ) . 

Switzerland, of which the genius and the Hterature 
were purely and unmixedly German ; and this he 
laid down as a position which nobody would dream 
of challenging. 

I say it is strange that this should be so, and we 
in particular have reason for inquiring whether it 
really is so ; because though, as I have said, even as 
a matter of science the Celt has a claim to be known, 
and we have an interest in knowing him, yet this 
interest is wonderfully enhanced if we find him to 
have actually a part in us. The question is to be 
tried by external and by internal evidence ; the 
language and the physical type of our race afford 
certain data for trying it, and other data are afforded 
by our literature, genius, and spiritual production 
generally. Data of this second kind belong to the 
province of the literary critic ; data of the first kind 
to the province of the philologist and of the phy- 
siologist. 

The province of the philologist and of the phy- 
siologist is not mine ; but this whole question as to 
the mixture of Celt with Saxon in us has been so 
little explored, people have been so prone to settle it 
off-hand according to their prepossessions, that even 



( 90 ) 

on the philological and physiological side of it I must 
say a few words in passing. Surely it must strike 
with surprise any one who thinks of it, to find that 
without any immense inpouring of a w^hole people, 
that by mere expeditions of invaders having to come 
over the sea, and in no greater numbers than the 
Saxons, so far as we can make out, actually came, 
the old occupants of this island, the Celtic Britons, 
should have been completely annihilated, or even so 
completely absorbed that it is vain to seek after 
Celtic elements in the existing English race. Of 
deliberate wholesale extermination of the Celtic race, 
all of them who could not fly to Wales or Scotland, 
we hear nothing ; and without some such extermina- 
tion one would suppose that a great mass of them 
must have remained in the countr}', their lot the 
obscure and, so to speak, underground lot of a 
subject race, but yet insensibly getting mixed with 
their conquerors, and their blood entering into the 
composition of a new people, in which the stock of 
the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the 
conquered, too, counts for something. How little the 
triumph of the conqueror's laws, manners, and lan- 
guage, proves the extinction of the old race, we may 



( 91 ) 

see by looking at France ;lGaul was Latinised in 
language, manners, and laws, and yet her people 
remained essentially Celtic.^) The Germanisation of 
Britain went far deeper than the Latinisation of 
France, and not only laws, manners, and language, 
but the main current of the blood, became Ger- 
manic ; but how, without some process of radical 
extirpation, of which, as I say, there is no evidence, 
can there have failed to subsist in Britain, as in 
Gaul, a Celtic current too ? The indications of this 
in our language have never yet been thoroughly 
searched out ; the Celtic names of places prove 
nothing, of course, as to the point here in question ; 
they come from the pre-historic times, the times 
before the nations, Germanic or Celtic, had crys- 
tallised, and they are everywhere, as the impetuous 
Celt was formerly everywhere, — in the Alps, the 
Apennines, the Cevennes, the Rhine, the Po, as well 
as in the Thames, the H umber, Cumberland, London. 
But it is said that the words of Celtic origin for things 
having to do with every-day peaceful life, — the life 
of a settled nation, — words like basket (to take an 
instance which all the world knows) form a much 
larger body in our language than is commonly 



( 92 ) 

supposed ; it is said that a number of our raciest, 
most idiomatic, popular words — for example, ba7n, 
kick, whop, twaddle, ficdge, hitch, muggy, — are Celtic. 
These assertions require to be carefully examined, and 
it by no means follows that because an English word 
is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence ; 
but they have not yet had the attention which, as 
illustrating through language this matter of the sub- 
sistence and intermingling in our nation of a Celtic 
part, they merit. 

Nor have the physiological data which illustrate 
this matter had much , more attention from us in 
England. But in France, a physician, half English 
by blood though a Frenchman by home and lan- 
guage. Monsieur W. F. Edwards, brother to Mon- 
sieur Milne-Edwards, the well-known zoologist, 
published in 1839 a letter to Monsieur Amedee 
Thierry with this title : Des Caracteres Physio logiqties 
des Races Humaines considirSs dans leurs Rapports 
avec r Histoire. The letter attracted great attention 
on the Continent ; it fills not much more than a 
hundred pages, and they are a hundred pages which 
well deserve reading and re-reading. Monsieur 
Thierry in his Histoire des Gaiilois had divided the 



( 93 ) 

population of Gaul into certain groups, and the object 
of Monsieur Edwards was to try this division by 
physiology. Groups of men have, he says, their 
physical type which distinguishes them, as w^ell as 
their language ; the traces of this physical type 
endure as the traces of language endure, and phy- 
siology is enabled to verify history by them. Accord- 
ingly, he determines the physical type of each of the 
two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the Cymris, 
who are said to have been distributed in a certain 
order through Gaul, and then he tracks these types in 
the population of France at the present day, and so 
verifies the alleged original order of distribution. 
In doing this, he makes excursions into neighbour- 
ing countries where the Gaels and the Cymris have 
been, and he declares that in England he finds 
abundant traces of the physical type which he has 
established as the Cymric, still subsisting in our 
population, and having descended from the old 
British possessors of our soil before the Saxon 
conquest. But if we are to believe the current 
English opinion, says Monsieur Edwards, the stock 
of these old British possessors is clean gone. On 
this opinion he makes the following comment : — 



( 94 ) 

"In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the 
Britons were no longer an independent nation, nor 
even a people with any civil existence at all. For 
history, therefore, they were dead, above all for 
history as it was then written ; but they had not 
perished; they still lived on, and undoubtedly in 
such numbers as the remains of a great nation, in 
spite of its disasters, might still be expected to keep. 
That the Britons were destroyed or expelled from 
England, properly so called, is, as I have said, a 
popular opinion in that country. It is founded on 
the exaggeration of the writers of history ; but in 
these very writers, when we come to look closely 
at what they say, we find the confession that the 
remains of this people were reduced to a state of 
strict servitude. Attached to the soil, they will 
have shared in that emancipation which during the 
course of the middle ages gradually restored to poli- 
tical life the mass of the population in the countries 
of Western Europe ; recovering by slow degrees 
their rights without resuming their name, and rising 
gradually with the rise of industry, they will have 
got spread through all ranks of society. The 
gradualness of this movement, and the obscurity 



• ( 95 ) 

which enwrapped its beginnings, allowed the con- 
tempt of the conqueror and the shame of the con- 
quered to become fixed feelings ; and so it turns out, 
that an Englishman who now thinks himself sprung 
from the Saxons or the Normans, is often in reality 
the descendant of the Britons." 

So physiology, as well as language, incomplete 
though the application of their tests to this matter 
has hitherto been, may lead us to hesitate before 
accepting the round assertion that it is vain to 
search for Celtic elements in any modern English- 
man. But it is not only by the tests of physiology 
and language that we can try this matter. As there 
are for physiology physical marks, such as the square 
heads of the German, the round head of the Gael, 
the oval head of the Cymri, which determine the 
type of a people, so for criticism there are spiritual 
marks which determine the type, and make us speak 
of the Greek genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic 
genius, and so on. Here is another test at our 
service ; and this test, too, has never yet been 
thoroughly employed. [^Foreign critics have indeed 
occasionally hazarded the idea that in English poetry 
there is a Celtic element traceableT'and Mr. Morley, 



( 96 ) 

in his very readable as well as very useful book on 
the English writers before Chaucer, has a sentence 
which struck my attention when I read it, because 
it expresses an opinion which I, too, have long held. 
Mr. Morley says : — h" The main current of English 
literature cannot be disconnected from the livdy 
Celtic wit in which it has one of its sources. The 
Celts do not form an utterly distinct part of our 
mixed population. But for early, frequent, and 
various contact with the race that in its half- 
barbarous days invented Ossian's dialogues with St. 
Patrick, and that quickened afterwards the North- 
men's blood in France, Germanic England would 
not have produced a Shakspeare." But there 
Mr. Morley leaves the matter. He indicates this 
Celtic element and influence, but he does not show 
us, — it did not come within the scope of his work to 
show us, — how this influence has declared itself. 
Unlike the physiological test, or the linguistic test, 
this literary, spiritual test is one which I may per- 
haps be allowed to try my hand at applying. I say 
that there is a Celtic element in the Enoflish nature, 
as well as a Germanic element, and that this element 
manifests itself in our spirit and literature. But 



( 97 ) 

before I try to point out how It manifests Itself, It 
may be as well to get a clear notion of what we 
mean by a Celtic element, a Germanic element ; 
what characters, that Is, determine for us the Celtic 
genius, the Germanic genius, as we commonly con- 
ceive the two. 



IV. 

Let me repeat what I have often said of the 
characteristics which mark the English spirit, the 
English genius. This spirit, this genius, judged, to 
be sure, rather from a friend's than an enemy's point 
of view, yet judged on the whole fairly, is charac- 
terised, I J;iave repeatedly said, by energy with honesty. 
Take away some of the energy which comes to us, as 
I believe, in part from Celtic and Roman sources ; 
instead" of energy, say rather steadiness ; and you 
have the Germanic genius : steadiness with honesty. 
It is evident how nearly the two characterisations 
approach one another ; and yet they leave, as we 
shall see, a great deal of room for difference. 
Steadiness with honesty ; the danger for a national 

7 



( 98 ) 

Spirit thus composed is the humdrum, the plain and 
and ugly, the ignoble : in a word, das Gemeine, die 
Gemeinheit, that curse of Germany, against which 
Goethe was all his life fighting. The excellence of 
a national spirit thus composed is freedom from 
whim, flightiness, perverseness ; patient fidelity to 
Nature, — in a word, science, — leading it at last, though 
slowly, and not by the most brilliant road, out of 
the bondage of the humdrum and common, into the 
better life. The universal dead-level of plainness 
and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction 
in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of 
the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad 
tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere, pressing 
at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in 
Northern Germany, and making him impatient to 
be gone, — this is the weak side ; the industry, the 
well-doing, the patient steady elaboration of things, 
the idea of science governing all departments of 
human activity, — this is the strong side ; and through 
this side of her genius, Germany has already 
obtained excellent results, and is destined, we may 
depend upon it, however her pedantry, her slowness, 
her fumbling, her ineffectiveness, her bad govern- 



( 99 ) 

ment, may at times make us cry out, to an Immense 
development." 

For diibiess, the creeping Saxons, — says an old 
Irish poem, assigning the characteristics for which 
different nations are celebrated : — • 

For acuteness and valour, the Greeks, 

For excessive pride, the Romans, 

For duhiess, the creeping Saxons ; 

For beauty and amorousness, the Gaedhils. 

We have seen in what sense, and with what expla- 
nation, this characterisation of the German may be 
allowed to stand ; now let us come to the beautiful 
and amorous Gaedhil. Or rather, let us find a 
definition which may suit both branches of the Celtic 
family, the Cymri as well as the Gael. It is clear 
that special circumstances may have developed some 
one side in the national character of Cymri or Gael, 
Welshman or Irishman, so that the observers notice 
shall be readily caught by this side, and yet it may 
be impossible to adopt it as characteristic of the 
Celtic nature generally. For instance, in his beau- 

* It is to be remembered that the above was written before 
the recent war between Prussia and Austria. 

7—2 



( loo ) 

tiful essay on the poetry of the Celtic races, M. 
Renan, with his eyes fixed on the Bretons and the 
Welsh, is struck with the timidity, the shyness, the 
delicacy of the Celtic nature, its preference for a 
retired life, its embarrassment at having to deal with 
the great world. He talks of his douce petite race 
naturellement chritienne, his race fiere et timide, a 
lexterieur gauche et embarrassee. But it is evident 
that this description, however well it may do for the 
Cymri, will never do for the Gael, never do for the 
typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair. Again, M. 
Renan's infinie dSlicatesse de sentime^it gtci caractirise 
la race Celtique, how little that accords with the 
popular conception of an Irishman who wants to 
borrow money! Sentiment is, however, the word 
which marks where the Celtic races really touch and 
are one ; sentimental, if the Celtic nature is to be 
characterised by a single term, is the best term to 
take. An organisation quick to feel impressions, 
and feeling them very strongly ; a lively personality 
therefore, keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow ; this 
is the main point. If the downs of life too much 
outnumber the ups, this temperament, just because 
it is so quickly and nearly conscious of all impres- 



( lOI ) 

sions, may no doubt be seen shy and wounded ; it 
may be seen In wistful regret, it may be seen in 
passionate, penetrating melancholy ; but its essence 
is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to 
be expansive, adventurous, and gay. Our word gay, 
it Is said, Is Itself Celtic. It Is not from gaudium, 
but from the Celtic gair, to laugh ;* and the Impres- 
sionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more 
down because It Is so his nature to be up — to be 
sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away 
brilliantly. He loves bright colours, he easily 
becomes audacious, overcrowing, full of fanfaronade. 
The German, say the physiologists, has the larger 
volume of Intestines (and who that has ever seen a 
German at a table-d'hote will not readily believe 
this ?), the Frenchman has the more developed 



* The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin's, but Lord 
Strangford says : — " Whatever gai may be, it is assuredly not 
Celtic. Is there any authority for this word gair, to laugh, or 
rather * laughter,' beyond O'Reilly ? O'Reilly is no authority at 
all except in so far as tested and passed by the new school. It is 
hard to give up gavisus. But Diez, chief authority in Romanic 
matters, is content to accept Muratori's reference to an old High- 
German ^^/^/, modern y^7;^, sharp, quick, sudden, brisk, and so to 
the sense of lively, animated, high in spirits." 



( I02 ) 

organs of respiration. That is just the expansive, 
eager Celtic nature ; the head in the air, snuffing and 
snorting ; a prottd look and a high stomach, as the 
Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage 
temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by those 
words. For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is 
more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the 
ground, than the German. The Celt is often called 
sensual ; but it is not so much' the vulgar satisfactions 
of sense that attract him as emotion and excite- 
ment ; he is truly, as I began by saying, sentimental. 
Sentimental, — ahuays i^eady to react against the 
despotism of fact ; that is the description a great 
friend* of the Celt gives of him ; and it is not a bad 
description of the sentimental temperament ; it lets 
us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual 
want of success. Balance, measure, and patience, 
these are the eternal conditions, even supposing the 
happiest temperament to start with, of high success ; 
and balance, measure, and patience are just what the 
Celt has never had. Even in the world of spiritual 



" Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the CeUs, in his 
Hist'oire de Fra?ice, are full of information and interest. 



( I03 ) 

creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts 
of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded 
perfectly, because he never has had steadiness, 
patience, sanity enough to comply with the condi- 
tions under which alone can expression be perfectly 
given to the finest perceptions and emotions. The 
Greek has the same perceptive, emotional tempera- 
ment as the Celt; but 'he adds to this temperament 
the sense of measure ; hence his admirable success in 
the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its 
chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual 
straining after mere emotion, has accomplished 
nothing. In the comparatively petty art of orna- 
mentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, 
and so on, he has done just enough to show his 
delicacy of taste, his happy temperament ; but the 
grand difficulties of painting and sculpture, the pro- 
longed dealings of spirit with matter, he has never 
had patience for. Take the more spiritual arts of 
music and poetry. All that emotion alone can do 
in music the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion 
breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs ; but with all 
this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so 
eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, 



( I04 ) 

effected in music, to be compared with what the less 
emotional German, steadily developing his musical 
feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a 
Beethoven, has effected ? In poetry, again, — poetry 
which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved ; 
poetry where emotion counts for so much, but where 
reason, too, reason, measure, sanity, also count for 
so much, — the Celt has shown genius, indeed, splendid 
genius ; but even here his faults have clung to him, 
and hindered him from producing great works, such 
as other nations with a genius for poetry, — the 
Greeks, say, or the Italians,— have produced. /The. 
Celt has not produced great poetical works, he has 
only produced poetry with an air of greatness invest- 
ing it all, and sometimes giving, moreover, to short 
pieces, or to passages, lines, and snatches of long 
pieces, singular beauty and power. And yet he 
loved poetry so much that he grudged no pains to 
it ; but the true art, the ai^chitectonice which shapes 
great works, such as the Agamem7ton or the Divine 
Comedy, comes only after a steady, deep-searching 
survey, a firm conception of the facts of human life, 
which the Celt has not patience for. ' So he runs off 
into technic, where he employs the utmost elabora- 



( 105 ) 

tion, and attains astonishing skill ; but In the contents 
of his poetry you have only so much Interpretation of 
the world as the first dash of a quick, strong percep- 
tion, and then sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring 
you. Here, too, his want of sanity and steadfastness 
has kept the Celt back from the highest success. 

If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the 
Celt even in spiritual work, how much more must it 
have lamed him in the world of business and politics ! 
The skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends 
which Is needed both to make progress in material 
civilisation, and also to form powerful states, Is just 
what the Celt has least turn for. He Is sensual, as 
I have said, or at least sensuous ; loves bright 
colours, company, and pleasure ; and here he is like 
the Greek and Latin races ; but compare the talent 
the Greek and Latin (or Latinised) races have shown 
for gratifying their senses, for procuring an outward 
life, rich, luxurious, splendid, with the Celt's failure 
to reach any material civilisation sound and satisfy- 
ing, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half- 
barbarous. The sensuousness of the Greek made 
Sybaris and Corinth, the sensuousness of the Latin 
made Rome and Balse, the sensuousness of the 



( io6 ) 

Latinised Frenchman makes Paris ; the sensuous- 
ness of the Celt proper has made Ireland. Even in 
his ideal heroic times, his gay and sensuous nature 
cannot carry him, in the appliances of his favourite 
life of sociability and pleasure, beyond the gross and 
creeping Saxon whom he despises ; the regent Breas, 
we are told in the Battle of Moytttra of the Fomo- 
rians, became unpopular because " the knives of his 
people were not greased at his table, nor did their 
breath smell of ale at the banquet." In its grossness 
and barbarousness is not that Saxon, as Saxon as it 
can be ? just what the Latinised Norman, sensuous 
and sociable like the Celt, but with the talent to 
make this bent of his serve to a practical embellish- 
ment of his mode of living, found so disgusting in 
the Saxon. 

And as in material civilisation he has been in- 
^ effectual, so has the Celt been ineffectual in politics. 
This colossal, impetuous, adventurous wanderer, the 
Titan of the (, -irly world, who in primitive times 
fills so large a place on earth's scene, dwindles and 
dwindles as history goes on, and at last is shrunk to 
what we now see him. For ages and ages the world 
has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, 



( I07 ) 

out of the Celt's grasp. " They went forth to the 
war," Ossian says most truly, " but they always fell!' 
And yet. If one sets about constituting an ideal 
genius, what a great deal of the Celt does one find 
oneself drawn to put into it ! Of an ideal genius 
one does not want the elements, any of them, to be 
in a state of weakness ; on the contrary, one wants 
all of them to be in the highest state of power ; but 
with a law of measure, of harmony, presiding over 
the whole. So the sensibility of the Celt, if every- 
thing else were not sacrificed to it, is a beautiful and 
admirable force. For sensibility, the power of quick 
and strong perception and emotion, is one of the 
very prime constituents of genius, perhaps its most 
positive constituent ; it is to the soul what good 
senses are to the body, the grand natural condition 
of successful activity. Sensibility gives genius its 
materials ; one cannot have too much of it, if one 
can but keep its master and not be its slave. Do 
not let us wish that the Celt had hac Jess sensibility, 
but that he had been more master of it. Even as it 
is, if his sensibility has been a source of weakness 
to him, it has been a source of power too, and a 
source of happiness. Some people have found in 



( io8 ) 

the Celtic nature and its sensibility the main root 
out of which chivalry and romance and the glorifica- 
tion of a feminine ideal spring ; this is a great ques- 
tion, with which I cannot deal here. Let me notice 
in passing, however, that there is, in truth, a Celtic 
air about the extravagance of chivalry, its reaction 
against the despotism of fact, its straining human 
nature further than it will stand. But putting all 
this question of chivalry and its origin on one side, 
no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its 
nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, 
and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the 
spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy ; he has an affinity 
to it ; he is not far from its secret. Again, his sensi- 
bility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling 
of nature and the life of nature ; here, too, he seems 
in a special way attracted by the secret before him, 
the secret of natural beauty and natural magic, and 
to be close to it, to half-divine it. In the produc- 
tions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so 
interesting as the evidences of this power : I shall 
have occasion to give specimens of them by-and-by. 
The same sensibility made the Celts full of reverence 
and enthusiasm for genius, learning, and the things of 



( '09 ) 

the mind ; to be a bai^d, freed a man, — that Is a cha- 
racteristic stroke of this generous and ennobling 
ardour of theirs, which no race has ever shown more 
strongly. Even the extravagance and exaggeration 
of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something 
romantic and attractive about it, something which 
has a sort of smack of misdirected good. The Celt, 
undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, 
but out of affection and admiration giving himself 
body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising 
political temperament, it is just the opposite of the 
Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily 
obedient within certain limits, but retaining an in- 
alienable part of freedom and self-dependence ; but 
it is a temperament for which one has a kind of 
sympathy notwithstanding. And very often, for the 
gay defiant reaction against fact of the lively Celtic 
nature one has more than sympathy ; one feels, in 
spite of the extravagance, in spite of good sense dis- 
approving, magnetised and exhilarated by It. The 
Gauls had a rule inflicting a fine on every warrior 
who, when he appeared on parade, was found to stick 
out too much in front, — to be corpulent, in short. 
Such a rule Is surely the maddest article of war ever 



( "o ) 

framed, and to people to whom nature has assigned 
a large volume of intestines, must appear, no doubt, 
horrible ; but yet has it not an audacious, sparkling, 
immaterial manner with it, which lifts one out of 
routine, and sets one's spirits in a glow ? 

All tendencies of human nature are in them- 
selves vital and profitable ; when they are blamed, 
they are only to be blamed relatively, not abso- 
lutely. This holds true of the Saxon's phlegm 
as well as of the Celt's sentiment. Out of the 
steady humdrum habit of the creeping Saxon, as 
the Celt calls him, — out of his way of going near 
the ground, — has come, no doubt, Philistinism, that 
plant of essentially Germanic growth, flourishing 
with its genuine marks only in the German father- 
land. Great Britain and her colonies, and the United 
States of America ; but what a soul of goodness 
there is in Philistinism itself ! and this soul of good- 
ness I, who am often supposed to be Philistinism's 
mortal enemy merely because I do not wish it to 
have things all its own way, cherish as much as 
anybody. This steady-going habit leads at last, as 
I have said, up ta science, up to the comprehension 
and interpretation of the world. With us in Great 



( III ) 

Britain, it is true, it does not seem to lead so far as 
that ; it is in Germany, where the habit is more 
unmixed, that it can lead to science. Here with us 
it seems at a certain point to meet with a conflicting 
force, which checks it and prevents its pushing on to 
science ; but before reaching this point what con- 
quests has it not won ! and all the more, perhaps, 
for stopping short at this point, for spending its 
exertions within a bounded field, the field of plain 
sense, of direct practical utility. How it has aug 
mented the comforts and conveniences of life for us ! 
Doors that open, windows that shut, locks that turn, 
razors that shave, coats that wear, watches that go, 
and a thousand more such good things, are the 
invention of the Philistines. 

Here, then, if commingling there is in our race, 
are two very unlike elements to commingle ; the 
steady-going Saxon temperament and the sen- 
timental Celtic temperament. But before we go on 
to try and verify, in our life and literature, the 
alleged fact of this commingling, we have yet another 
element to take into account, the Norman element. 
The critic in the Saturday Revmw, whom I have 
already quoted, says that in looking for traces of 



( 112 ) 

Normanism in our national genius, as in looking for 
traces of Celtism in it, we do but lose our labour ; he 
says, indeed, that there went to the original making 
of our nation a very great deal more of a Norman 
element than of a Celtic element, but he asserts that 
both elements have now so completely disappeared, 
that it is vain to look for any trace of either of them 
in the modern Englishman. But this sort of asser- 
tion I do not like to admit without trying it a little. 
I want, therefore, to get some plain notion of the 
Norman habit and genius, as I have sought to 
get some plain notion of the Saxon and Celtic. 
Some people will say that the Normans are Teutonic, 
and that therefore the distinguishing characters of 
the German genius must be those of their genius 
also ; but the matter cannot be settled in this speedy 
fashion. No doubt the basis of the Norman race is 
Teutonic ; but the governing point in the history of 
the Norman race, — so far, at least, as we English have 
to do with it, — is not its Teutonic origin, but its Latin 
civilisation. The French people have, as I have 
already remarked, an undoubtedly Celtic basis, yet 
so decisive in its •effect upon a nation's habit and 
character can be the contact with a stronger civilisa- 



( ^^3 ) 

tion, that Gaul, Avithout changing the basis of her 
blood, became, for all practical intents and purposes, 
a Latin country, France and not Ireland, through 
the Roman conquest. Latinism conquered Celtism 
in her, as it also conquered the Germanism imported 
by the Prankish and other invasions ; Celtism is, 
however, I need not say, everywhere manifest still 
in the French nation ; even Germanism is distinctly 
traceable in it, as any one who attentively com- 
pares the French with other Latin races will see. 
No one can look carefully at the French troops in 
Rome, amongst the Italian population, and not per- 
ceive this trace of Germanism ; I do not mean in the 
Alsatian soldiers only, but in the soldiers of genuine 
France. But the governing character of France, as 
a power in the world, is Latin ; such was the force 
of Greek and Roman civilisation upon a race whose 
whole mass remained Celtic, and where the Celtic 
language still lingered on, they say, among the 
common people, for some five or six centuries after 
the Roman conquest. But the Normans in Neustria 
lost their old Teutonic language in a wonderfully 
short time ; when they conquerld England they 
were already Latinised ; with them were a number 



( "4 ,) 

of Frenchmen by race, men from Anjou and Poltou, 
so they brought into England more non-Teutonic 
blood, besides what they had themselves got by 
intermarriage, than is commonly supposed ; the 
great point, however, is, that by civilisation this 
vigorous race, when it took possession of England, 
was Latin. 

These Normans, who in Neustria had lost their 
old Teutonic tongue so rapidly, kept in England their 
new Latin tongue for some three centuries. It was 
Edward the Third's reign before English came to be 
used in law-pleadings and spoken at court. Why 
this difference ? Both in Neustria and in England 
the Normans were a handful; but in Neustria, as 
Teutons, they were in contact with a more advanced 
civilisation than their own ;. in England, as Latins, 
with a less advanced. The Latinised Normans in 
England had the sense for fact, which the Celts had 
not ; and the love of strenuousness, clearness, and 
rapidity, the high Latin spirit, which the Saxons had 
not. They hated the slowness and dulness of the 
creeping Saxon ; it offended their clear, strenuous 
talent for affairs, ^ it offended the Celt's quick and 
delicate perception. The Normans had the Roman 



I 



( >i5 ) 

talent for affairs, the Roman decisiveness in emer- 
gencies. They have been called prosaic, but this is 
not a right word for them ; they 'were neither sen- 
timental, nor, strictly speaking, poetical. They had 
more sense for rhetoric than for poetry, like the 
Romans ; but, like the Romans, they had too high 
a spirit not to like a noble intellectual stimulus of 
some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region 
of the merely prosaic. Their foible, — the bad excess 
of their characterising quality of strenuousness, — 
was not a prosaic flatness, it was hardness and 
insolence. 

I have been obliged to fetch a very wide circuit, 
but at last I have got what I went to seek. I have 
got a rough, but, I hope, clear notion of these three 
forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the 
Norman genius. The Germanic genius has steadi- 
ness as its main basis, with commonness and hum- 
drum for its defect, fidelity to nature for its 
excellence. The Celtic genius, sentiment as its 
main basis, with love of beauty, charm, and 
spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self- 
will for its defect. The Norman genius, talent for 
affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear 

8 — 2 



( ii6 ) 

rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for 
its defect. And now to try and trace these in the 
composite English genius. 



V. 

To begin with what is more external. If we are 
so wholly Anglo-Saxon and Germanic as people say, 
how comes it that the habits and gait of the German 
language are so exceedingly unlike ours ? Why 
while the Times talks in this fashion : "At noon a 
long line of carriages extended from Pall Mall to the 
Peers' entrance of the Palace of Westminster," does 
the Cologne Gazette talk in this other fashion : 
" Nachdem die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem 
Giirzenich-Saale zu Ehren der Abgeordneten Statt 
finden sollenden Bankette bereits vollstandig getroffen 
worden waren, fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche 
Anordnung die Schliessung sammtlicher Zugange 
zum Giirzenich Statt ? "* Surely the mental habit 



* The above is really a sentence taken from the Cologne 
Gazette. Lord Strangford's comment here is as follows : — 
"Modern Germanism, in a general estimate of Germanism, should 



( "7 ) 

of people who express their thoughts in so very 
different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, 
the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, 
the other striding, cannot be essentially the same. 
The English language, strange compound as it is, 
with its want of inflections, and with all the diffi- 
culties which this want of inflections brings upon it, 
has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, 
a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as 
French or Latin. Again : perhaps no nation, after 
the Greeks and Romans, has so clearly felt in what 
true rhetoric, rhetoric of the best kind, consists, and 



not be taken, absolutely and necessarily, as the constant, whereof 
we are the variant. The Low-Dutch of Holland, anyhow, are 
indisputably as genuine Dutch as the High-Dutch of Germany 
Proper. But do they write sentences like this one, — informe^ 
ingens, an lumen adeinptuin ? If not, the question must be asked, 
not how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have 
come to deviate. Our modern English prose in plain matters is 
often all just the same as the prose of King Alfred and the 
Chronicle. Ohthere's North Sea Voyage and Wulfstan's Baltic 
Voyage is the sort of thing which is sent in every day, one may 
say, to the Geographical or Ethnological Society, in the whole 
style and turn of phrase and thought." 

The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the 
stock. But see, moreover, wliat I have said at p. 120. 



I 



reached so high a pitch of excellence in this, as the 
English. Our sense for rhetoric has in some ways 
done harm to us in our cultivation of literature, harm 
to us, still more, in our cultivation of science ; but in 
the true sphere of rhetoric, in public speaking, this 
sense has given us orators whom I do think we may, 
without fear of being contradicted and accused of 
blind national vanity, assert to have inherited the great 
Greek and Roman oratorical tradition more than the 
orators of any other country. Strafford, Boling- 
broke, the two Pitts, Fox, — to cite no other names, 
— I imagine few will dispute that these call up the 
notion of an oratory, in kind, in extent, in power, 
coming nearer than any other body of modern 
oratory to the oratory of Greece and Rome. And 
the affinity of spirit in our best public life and 
greatest public men to those of Rome, has often 
struck observers, foreign as well as English. Now, 
not only have the Germans shown no eminent 
aptitude for rhetoric such as the English have 
shown, — that was not to be expected, since our 
public life has done so much to develope an aptitude 
of this kind, and the public life of the Germans has 
done so little, — but they seem in a singular degree 



( H9 ) 

devoid of any aptitude at all for rhetoric. Take a 
speech from the throne In Prussia, and compare it 
with a speech from the throne In England. 
Assuredly It Is not In speeches from the throne that 
English rhetoric or any rhetoric shows its best side ; 
— they are often cavilled at, often justly cavilled at ; 
- — no wonder, for this form of composition is beset 
with very trying difficulties. But what is to be 
remarked is this ; — a speech from the throne falls 
essentially wathin the sphere of rhetoric, it is one's 
sense of rhetoric which has to fix its tone and style, 
so as to keep a certain note always sounding In it ; 
in an English speech from the throne, whatever Its 
faults, this rhetorical note is always struck and kept 
to ; in a Prussian speech from the throne, never. An 
English speech from the throne is rhetoric ; a Prus- 
sian speech is half talk, — heavy talk, — and half 
effusion. This is one instance, it may be said ; true, 
but in one instance of this kind the presence or 
the absence of an aptitude for rhetoric is decisively 
shown. Well, then, why am I not to say that we 
English get our rhetorical sense from the Norman 
element in us, — our turn for this strenuous, direct, 
high-spirited talent of oratory, from the Influence of 



( I20 ) 

the strenuous, direct, high-spirited Normans? Modes 
of Hfe, institutions, government, and other such 
causes, are sufficient, I shall be told, to account 
for English oratory. Modes of life, institutions, 
government, climate, and so forth, — let me say it 
once for all, — will further or hinder the develop- 
ment of an aptitude, but they will not by them- 
selves create the aptitude or explain it. On the 
other hand, a people's habit and complexion of nature 
go far to determine its modes of life, institutions, and 
government, and even to prescribe the limits within 
which the influences of climate shall tell upon it. 

However, it is not my intention, in these remarks, 
to lay it down for certain that this or that part of 
our powers, shortcomings, and behaviour, is due to 
a Celtic, German, or Norman element in us. To 
establish this I should need much wider limits, and 
a knowledge, too, far beyond what I possess ; all I 
purpose is to point out certain correspondences, not 
yet, perhaps, sufficiently observed and attended to, 
which seem to lead towards certain conclusions. 
The following up the inquiry till full proof is 
reached, — or perhaps, full disproof, — is what I want 
t<:) suggest to more competent persons. Premising 



( 121 ) 

this, I now go on to a second matter, somewhat 
more delicate and inward than that with which I 
began. Every one knows how well the Greek and 
Latin races, with their direct sense for the visible, 
palpable world, have succeeded in the plastic arts. 
The sheer German races, too, with their honest love 
of fact, and their steady pursuit of it, — their fidelity 
to nature, in short, — have attained a high degree of 
success in these arts ; few people will deny that 
Albert Dlirer and Rubens, for example, are to be 
called masters in painting, and in the high kind 
of painting. The Celtic races, on the other hand, 
have shown a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts ; 
the abstract, severe character of the Druidical reli- 
gion, its dealing with the eye of the mind rather 
than the eye of the body, its having no elaborate 
temples and beautiful idols, all point this way from 
the first ; its sentiment cannot satisfy itself, cannot 
even find a resting-place for itself, in colour and 
form ; it presses on to the impalpable, the ideal. The 
forest of trees and the forest 'of rocks, not hewn 
timber and carved stones, suit its aspirations for 
something not to be bounded or expressed. With 
this tendency, the Celtic races have, as I remarked 



( 122 ) 

before, been necessarily almost impotent In the 
higher branches of the plastic arts. Ireland, that has 
produced so many powerful spirits, has produced no 
great sculptors or painters. Cross into England. 
The inaptitude for the plastic art strikingly dimin-^ 
ishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element, 
preponderates in the race. And yet in England, too, 
in the English race, there is something which seems 
to prevent our reaching real mastership in the plastic 
arts, as the more unmixed German races have 
reached it. Reynolds and Turner are painters of 
genius, who can doubt It ? but take a European jury, 
the only competent jury in these cases, and see if 
you can get a verdict giving them the rank of 
masters, as this rank is given to Raphael and Cor- 
reggio, or to Albert Dlirer and Rubens. And 
observe in what points our English pair succeed, 
and in what they fall short. They fall short in 
architedonice, in the highest power of composition, 
by which painting accomplishes the very uttermost 
which It is given to painting to accomplish; the highest 
sort of composition, the highest application of the 
art of painting, they either do not attempt, or they 
fail In it. Their defect, therefore, is on the side of 



( • 123 ) 

art, of plastic art. And they succeed in magic, in 
beauty. In grace, In expressing almost the Inexpres- 
sible : here Is the charm of Reynolds's children and 
Turner's seas ; the Impulse to express the Inexpres- 
sible carries Turner so far, that at last It carries him 
away, and even long before he is quite carried away, 
even in works that are justly extolled, one can see 
the stamp-mark, as the French say, of insanity. The 
excellence, therefore, the success. Is on the side of 
spirit. ^ Does not this look as if a Celtic stream met 
the mam German current In us, and gave It a some- 
what different course from that which it takes natu- 
rally?', We have Germanism enough in us, enough 
patient love for fact and matter, to be led to attempt 
the plastic arts, and we make much more way in 
them than the pure Celtic races make ; but at a 
certain point our Celtism comes In, with Its love of 
emotion, sentiment, the Inexpressible, and gives our 
best painters a bias. And the point at which It 
comes In Is just that critical point where the flower- 
ing of art into Its perfection commences ; we have 
plenty of painters who never reach this point at all, 
but remain always mere journeymen, In bondage to 
matter ; but those who do reach It, Instead of going 



( 124 ) 

on to the true consummation of the masters in 
painting, are a little overbalanced by soul and 
feeling, work too directly for these, and so do not 
get out of their art all that may be got out of it. 

The same modification of our Germanism by 
another force which seems Celtic, is visible in our 
religion. Here, too, we may trace a gradation be- 
tween Celt, Englishman, and German, the difference 
which distinguishes Englishman from German ap- 
pearing attributable to a Celtic element in us. Ger- 
many is the land of exegesis, England is the land 
of Puritanism. The religion of Wales is more 
emotional and sentimental than English Puritanism ; 
Romanism has indeed given way to Calvinism among 
the Welsh, — the one superstition has supplanted the 
other,— but the Celtic sentiment which made the Welsh 
such devout Catholics, remains, and gives unction to 
their Methodism ; theirs is not the controversial, 
rationalistic, intellectual side of Protestantism, but 
the devout, emotional, religious side. Among the 
Germans, Protestantism has been carried on into 
rationalism and science. The English hold a middle 
place between the Germans and the Welsh ; their 
religion has the exterior forms and apparatus of a 



( 125 ) 

rationalism, so far their Germanic nature carries them ; 
but long before they get to science, their feeling, their 
Celtic element catches them, and turns their religion 
all towards piety and unction. So English Protes- 
tantism has the outside appearance of an intellectual 
system, and the inside reality of an emotional 
system : this gives it its tenacity and force, for what 
is held with the ardent attachment of feeling is 
believed to have at the same time the scientific proof 
of reason. The English Puritan, therefore (and 
Puritanism is the characteristic form of English 
Protestantism), stands between the German Pro- 
testant and the Celtic Methodist ; his real affinity 
indeed, at present, being rather with his Welsh 
kinsman, if kinsman he may be called, than with his 
German. 

Sometimes one is left in doubt from whence the 
check and limit to Germanism in us proceeds, whether 
from a Celtic source or from a Norman source. Of 
the true steady-going German nature the bane is, as 
I remarked, flat commonness ; there seems no end 
to its capacity for platitude ; it has neither the quick 
perception of the Celt to save it from platitude, nor 
the strenuousness of the Norman ; it is only raised 



( 126 ) 

gradually out of it by science, but it jogs through 
almost interminable platitudes first. The English 
nature is not raised to science, but something in us, 
whether Celtic or Norman, seems to set a bound to 
our advance in platitude, to make us either shy of 
platitude, or impatient of it. I open an English 
reading-book for children, and I find these two cha- 
racteristic stories in it, one of them of English 
growth, the other of German. Take the English 
story first : — 

" A little boy accompanied his elder sister while 
she busied herself with the labours of the farm, 
asking questions at every step, and learning the 
lessons of life without being aware of it. 

" ' Why, dear Jane,' he said, ' do you scatter 
good grain on the ground ; would it not be better to 
make good bread of it than to throw it to the greedy 
chickens ? ' 

" ' In time,' replied Jane, ' the chickens will grow 
big, and each of them will fetch money at the 
market. One must think on the end to be attained 
without counting trouble, and learn to wait' 

" Perceiving a colt, which looked eagerly at him, 
the little boy cried out : ' Jane, why is the colt not 



( 127 ) 

in the fields with the labourers helping to draw the 
carts ? ' 

" ' The colt is young,' replied Jane, ' and he must 
lie idle till he gets the necessary strength ; one must 
not sacrifice the future to the present.' " 

The reader will say that is most mean and trivial 
stuff, the vulgar English nature in full force ; just 
such food as the Philistine would naturally provide 
for his young. He will say he can see the boy fed 
upon it growing up to be like his father, to be all for 
business, to despise culture, to go through his dull 
days, and to die without having ever lived. That 
may be so ; but now take the German story (one of 
Krummacher's), and see the difference :■ — - 

" There lived at the court of King Herod a rich 
man who was the king's chamberlain. He clothed 
himself in purple and fine linen, and fared like the 
king himself 

" Once a friend of his youth, whom he had not 
seen for many years, came from a distant land to pay 
him a visit. Then the chamberlain invited all his 
friends and made a feast In honour of the stranger. 

" The tables were covered with choice food 
placed on dishes of gold and silver, and the finest 



( 128 ) 

wines of all kinds. The rich man sate at the head 
of the table, glad to do the honours to his friend 
who was seated at his right hand. So they ate and 
drank, and were merry. 

'' Then the stranger said to the chamberlain of 
King Herod : ' Riches and splendour like thine are 
nowhere to be found in my country.' And he 
praised his greatness, and called him happy above 
all men on earth. 

"Well, the rich man took an apple from a golden 
vessel. The apple was large, and red, and pleasant 
to the eye. Then said he : ' Behold, this apple 
hath rested on gold, and its form is very beautiful.' 
And he presented it to the stranger, the friend of 
his youth. The stranger cut the apple in two ; and 
behold, in the middle of it there was a worm ! 

" Then the stranger looked at the chamberlain ; 
and the chamberlain bent his eyes on the ground, 
and sighed." 

There it ends. Now I say, one sees there an 
abyss of platitude open, and the German nature 
swimming calmly about in it, which seems in some 
way or other to have its entry screened off for the 
English nature. The English story leads with a 



( 129 ) 

direct issue Into practical life : a narrow and dry- 
practical life, certainly, but yet enough to supply a 
plain motive for the story ; the German story leads 
simply nowhere except Into bathos. Shall we say 
that the Norman talent for affairs saves lis here, or 
the Celtic perceptive Instinct ? one of them It must 
be, surely. The Norman turn seems most germane 
to the matter here Immediately In hand ; on the 
other hand, the Celtic turn, or some degree of It, 
some degree of Its quick perceptive Instinct, seems 
necessary to account for the full difference between 
the German nature and ours. Even In Germans of 
genius or talent the want of quick light tact, of 
Instinctive perception of the Impropriety or Impossi- 
bility of certain things. Is singularly remarkable. 
Herr Gervlnus's prodigious discovery about Handel 
being an Englishman and Shakspeare a German, the 
Incredible mare's-nest Goethe finds In looking for 
the origin of Byron's Manfred, — these are things 
from which no deliberate care or reflection can save 
a man ; only an instinct can save him from them, an 
instinct that they are absurd ; who can imagine 
Charles Lamb making Herr Gervlnus's blunder, or 
Shakspeare making Goethe's ? but from the sheer 

9 



( Uo ) 

German nature this intuitive tact seems something 
so alien, that even genius fails to give it. And yet 
just what constitutes special power and genius in a 
man seems often to be his blending with the basis of 
his national temperament, some additional gift or 
grace not proper to that temperament ; Shakspeare's 
greatness is thus in his blending an openness and 
flexibility of spirit, not English, with the English 
basis ; Addison's, in his blending a moderation and 
delicacy, not English, with the English basis ; 
Burke's, in his blending a largeness of view and 
richness of thought, not English, with the English 
basis. In Germany itself, in the same way, the 
greatness of their great Frederic lies in his blending 
a rapidity and clearness, not German, with the 
German basis ; the greatness of Goethe in his blend- 
ing a love of form, nobility, and dignity, — the grand 
style, — with the German basis. But the quick, sure, 
instinctive perception of the incongruous and absurd 
not even genius seems to give in Germany ; at least, 
I can think of only one German of genius, Lessing 
(for Heine was a Jew, and the Jewish temperament 
is quite another thing from the German), who shows 
it in an eminent degree. 



( 131 ) 

If we attend closely to the terms by which 
foreigners seek to hit off the impression which we 
and the Germans make upon them, we shall detect 
in these terms a difference which makes, I think, in 
favour of the notion I am propounding. Nations in 
hitting off one another's characters are apt, we all 
know, to seize the unflattering side rather than the 
flattering ; the mass of mankind always do this, and 
indeed they really see what is novel, and not their 
own, in a disfiguring light. Thus we ourselves, for 
instance, popularly say '' the phlegmatic Dutchman " 
rather than '' the sensible Dutchman," or " the 
grimacing Frenchman " rather than " the polite 
Frenchman." Therefore neither we nor the Ger- 
mans should exactly accept the description strangers 
give of us, but it is enough for my purpose that 
strangers, in characterising us with a certain shade 
of difference, do at any rate make it clear that there 
appears this shade of difference, though the character 
itself, which they give us both, may be a caricature 
rather than a faithful picture of us. Now it is to be 
noticed that those sharp observers, the French, — who 
have a double turn for sharp observation, for they 
have both the quick perception of the Celt and the 

9—2 



( 132 ) 

Latin's gift for coming plump upon the fact, — it Is to 
be noticed, I say, that the French put a curious 
distinction in their popular, depreciating, we will 
hope inadequate, way of hitting off us and the 
Germans. While they talk of the " betise alle- 
mande," they talk of the '' gaucherie anglaise ; " 
while they talk of the " Allemand balourdl' they talk 
of the '' Anglais empetre ; " while they call the 
German " niaisl' they call the Englishman *' milan- 
colique!' The difference between the epithets balourd 
and empetrS exactly gives the difference in character 
I wish to seize ; balourd means heavy and dull, 
empetri means hampered and embarrassed. This 
points to a certain mixture and strife of elements in 
the Englishman ; to the clashing of a Celtic quick- 
ness of perception with a Germanic instinct for going 
steadily along close to the ground. The Celt, as we 
have seen, has not at all, in spite of his quick per- 
ception, the Latin talent for dealing with the fact, 
dexterously managing it and making himself master 
of it ; Latin or Latinised people have felt contempt 
for him on this account, have treated him as a poor 
creature, just as the German, who arrives at fact in 
a different way from the Latins, but who arrives 



( ^33 ) 

at It, has treated him. The couplet of Chrestien of 

Troyes about the Welsh : — 

. . . Gallois sont tous, par nature, 
Plus fous que betes en pature — 

is well known, and expresses the genuine verdict of 
the Latin mind on the Celts. But the perceptive 
Instinct of the Celt feels and anticipates, though he 
has that in him which cuts him off from command 
of the world of fact ; he sees what is wanting to 
him well enough ; his mere eye is not less sharp, 
nay, it is sharper, than the Latin's. He Is a quick 
genius, checkmated for want of strenuousness or else 
patience. The German has not the Latin's sharp 
precise glance on the world of fact, and dexterous 
behaviour in it ; he fumbles with it much and long, 
but his honesty and patience give him the rule of It 
In the long run, — a surer rule, some of us think, than 
the Latin gets ; — still, his behaviour in it is not quick 
and dexterous. The Englishman, in so far as he is 
German, — and he is mainly German, — proceeds In 
the steady-going German fashion ; if he were all 
German he would proceed thus for ever without self- 
consciousness or embarrassment ; but, in so far as he 
is Celtic, he has snatches of quick Instinct which 



( 134 ) 

often make him feel he is fumbhng, show him visions 
of an easier, more dexterous behaviour, disconcert 
him and fill him with misgiving. No people, there- 
fore, are so shy, so self-conscious, so embarrassed as 
the English, because two natures are mixed in them, 
and natures which pull them such different ways. 
The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs in us, we are a 
Germanic people ; but not so wholly as to exclude 
hauntings of Celtism, which clash with our Ger- 
manism, producing, as I believe, our humour, neither 
German nor Celtic, and so affect us that we strike 
-people as odd and singular, not to be referred to 
any known type, and like nothing but ourselves. 
'' Nearly every Englishman," says an excellent and 
by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, 
" nearly every Englishman, however good-looking 
he may be, has always something singular about him 
which easily comes to seem comic ; — a sort of typical 
awkwardness iygaucherie typique) in his looks or 
appearance, which hardly ever wears out." I say 
this strangeness is accounted for by the English 
nature being mixed as we have seen, while the Latin 
nature is all of a piece, and so is the German nature, 
and the Celtic nature. 



( 135 ) 

It is impossible to go very fast when the matter 
with which one has to deal, besides being new and 
little explored, is also by its nature so subtle, 
eluding one's grasp unless one handles it with all 
possible delicacy and care. It is in our poetry that 
the Celtic part in us has left its trace clearest, and 
in our poetry I must follow it before I have done. 



VI. 

If I were asked where English poetry got these 
three things, its turn for style, its turn for melancholv^ 
and its turn for natural magic, for catching and ren- 
dering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and 
vivid way, — I should answer, with some doubt, that 
it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source ; 
with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy 
from a Celtic source ; with no doubt at all, that from 
a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic. 

Any German with penetration and tact in matters 
of literary criticism will own that the principal 
deficiency of German poetry is in style ; that for 
style, in the highest sense. It shows but little feeling. 
Take the eminent masters of style, the poets who 



( 136 ) 

best give the idea of what the peculiar power which 
lies in style is, — Pindar, Virgil, Dante, Milton. An 
example of the peculiar effect w^hich these poets 
produce, you can hardly give from German pottry. 
Examples enough you can give from German poetry 
of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feel- 
ing expressing themselves in clear language, simple 
language, passionate language, eloquent language, 
with harmony and melody ; but not of the peculiar 
effect exercised by eminent power of style. Every 
reader of Dante can at once call to mind what the 
peculiar effect I mean is ; I spoke of it in my lec- 
tures on translating Homer, and there I took an 
example of it from Dante, w-ho perhaps manifests 
it more eminently than any other poet. But from 
Milton, too, one may take examples of it abun- 
dantly ; compare this from Milton : — 

nor sometimes forget 

Those other tsvo equal with me in fate, 
So were I equall'd with them in renow^i, 
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides — 

with this from Goethe : — 

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, 
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. 



{ ^7 ) 

Nothing can be better in its way than the style in 
which Goethe there presents his thought, but it is 
the style of prose as much as of poetry ; it is ludd, 
harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received 
that peculiar kneading, heightening, and re-casting 
which is observable in the style of the passage from 
Milton, — a style which seems to have for its cause a 
certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet 
bridled, excitement in the poet, giving a special 
intensity to his way of delivering himself In poeti- 
cal races and epochs this turn for style is peculiarly 
observable ; and perhaps it is only on condition of 
having this somewhat heightened and difficult 
manner, so different from the plain manner of prose, 
that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed, at its 
best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid 
style, which Is the supreme style of all, but the 
simplicity of which is still not the simplicity of 
prose. The simplicity of Menander's style is the 
simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of sim- 
plicity as that which Goethe's style, in the passage 
I have quoted, exhibits ; but Menander does not 
belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late 
for it ; It Is the simple passages in poets like Pindar 



( 138 ) 

or Dante which are perfect, being masterpieces of 
poetical simplicity. One may say the same of the 
simple passages in Shakspeare ; they are perfect, 
their simplicity being a poetical simplicity. They 
are the golden, easeful, crowning moments of a 
manner which is always pitched in another key from 
that of prose, a manner changed and heightened ; the 
Elizabethan style, regnant in most of our dramatic 
poetry to this day, is mainly the continuation of this 
manner of Shakspeare's. It was a manner much 
more turbid and strown with blemishes than the 
manner of Pindar, Dante, or Milton ; often it was 
detestable ; but it owed its existence to Shakspeare's 
instinctive impulse towards style in poetry, to his 
native sense of the necessity for it ; and without the 
basis of style everywhere, faulty though it may in 
some places be, we should not have had the beauty 
of expression, unsurpassable for effectiveness and 
charm, which is reached in Shakspeare's best pas- 
sages. The turn for style is perceptible all through 
English poetry, proving, to my mind, the genuine 
poetical gift of the race; this turn imparts to our 
poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes 
it doubles the force of a poet not by nature of the 



( 139 ) 

very highest order, such as Gray, and raises him to 
a rank beyond what his natural richness and power 
seem to promise. Goethe, with his fine critical per- 
ception, saw clearly enough both the power of style 
in itself, and the lack of style In the literature of his 
own country ; and perhaps If we regard him solely 
as a German, not as a European, his great work was 
that he laboured all his life to impart style into 
German literature, and firmly to establish It there. 
Hence the immense importance to him of the world 
of classical art, and of the productions of Greek or 
Latin genius, where style so eminently manifests its 
power. Had he found In the German genius and 
literature an element of style existing by nature and 
ready to his hand, half his work, one may say, would 
have been saved him, and he might have done 
much more In poetry. But as It was, he had to 
try and create out of his own powers, a style for 
German poetry, as well as to provide contents for 
this style to carry; and thus his labour as a poet 
was doubled. 

It is to be observed that power of style, In the 
sense In which I am here speaking of style, is some- 
thing quite different from the power of Idiomatic 



( HO ) 

simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the expres- 
sion of healthy, robust natures so often is, such as 
Luther's was in a striking degree. Style, in my 
sense of the word, is a peculiar recasting and height- 
ening, under a certain condition of spiritual excite- 
ment, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as 
to add dignity and distinction to it ; and dignity and 
distinction are not terms which suit many acts or 
words of Luther. Deeply touched with the Ge77iein- 
heit which is the bane of his nation, as he is at the 
same time a grand example of the honesty which is his 
nation's excellence, he can seldom even show himself 
brave, resolute and truthful, without showing a strong 
dash of coarseness and commonness all the while ; 
the right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan, 
is that he is a Philistine of genius. So Luther's 
sincere idiomatic German, — such language is this : 
" Hilf lieber Gott, wie manchen Jammer habe ich 
gesehen, dass der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts 
weiss von der christlichen Lehre ! " — no more proves 
a power of style in German literature, than Cobbett's 
sinewy idiomatic English proves it in English litera- 
ture. Power of style, properly so-called, as manifested 
in masters of style like Dante or Milton in poetr)% 



( HI ) 

Cicero, Bossuet or Bolingbroke In prose, Is some- 
thing quite different, and has, as I have said, for 
Its characteristic effect, this : to add dignity and 
distinction. 

Style, then, the Germans are singularly without, 
and it Is strange that the power of style should show 
Itself so strongly as it does in the Icelandic poetry, 
If the Scandinavians are such genuine Teutons as is 
commonly supposed. Fauriel used to talk of the 
Scandinavian Teutons and the German Teutons, as 
If they were two divisions of the same people, and 
the common notion about them, no doubt, is very 
much this. Since the war In Schleswig-Holstein, 
however, all one's German friends are exceedingly 
anxious to insist on the difference of nature between 
themselves and the Scandinavians ; when one 
expresses surprise that the German sense of nation- 
ality should be so deeply affronted by the rule over 
Germans, not of Latins or Celts, but of brother 
Teutons or next door to it, a German will give you 
I know not how long a catalogue of the radical 
points of unllkeness, in genius and disposition, 
between himself and a Dane. This emboldens me 
to remark that there is a fire, a sense of style, a 



( 142 ) 

distinction, in Icelandic poetry, which German poetry 
has not. Icelandic poetry, too, shows a powerful 
and developed technic ; and I wish to throw out, for 
examination by those who are competent to sift the 
matter, the suggestion that this power of style and 
development of technic in the Norse poetry seems to 
point towards an early Celtic influence or inter- 
mixture. It is curious that Zeuss, in his grammar, 
quotes a text which gives countenance to this notion ; 
as late as the ninth century, he says, there were Irish 
Celts in Iceland ; and the text he quotes to show 
this, is as follows : — "In 870 a. d., when the 
Norwegians came to Iceland, there were Christians 
there, who departed, and left behind them Irish 
books, bells, and other things ; from whence it may 
be inferred that these Christians were Irish." I 
speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost diffi- 
dence on all these questions of ethnology ; but I 
must say that when I read this text in Zeuss, I 
caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to offer ; for I 
had been hearing the Nibehmgen read and com- 
mented on in German schools (German schools have 
the good habit of reading and commenting on 
German poetry, as we read and comment on Homer 



{ H3 ) 

and Virgil, but do 7io^ read and comment on Chaucer 
and Shakspeare), and it struck me how the fatal 
humdrum and want of style of the Germans had 
marred their way of telling this magnificent tradition 
of the Nibehmgen, and taken half its grandeur and 
power out of it ; while in the Icelandic poems which 
deal with this tradition, its grandeur and power are 
much more fully visible, and everywhere in the 
poetry of the Edda there is a force of style and a 
distinction as unlike as possible to the want of both 
in the German Nibelunge^i,^ At the same time the 

* Lord Strangford's note on this is : — " The Irish monks 
whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have 
contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished 
before the first Norseman had set foot on the island. The form 
of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the 
accident of its preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan- 
Teutonic from old times ; the art and method of its strictly literary 
cultivation must have been much influenced by the contemporary 
Old-English national poetry, with which the Norsemen were in 
constant contact ; and its larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have 
been owing to their freer and wilder life, to say nothing of their 
roused and warring paganism. They could never have known any 
Celts save when living in embryo with other Teutons." 

Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with 
which he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss 
alleges. 



( H4 ) 

Scandinavians have a realism, as It Is called, In their 
genius, which abundantly proves their relationship 
with the Germans ; any one whom Mr. Dasent's 
delightful books have made acquainted with the 
prose tales of the Norsemen, will be struck with 
the stamp of a Teutonic nature in them ; but the 
Norse poetry seems to have something which from 
Teutonic sources alone it could not have derived ; 
which the Germans have not, and which the Celts 
have. 

^^^^Jbis ^ something Is style, and the Celts certainly 
have it In a wonderful measure. Style Is the most 
striking quality of their poetry. Celtic poetry seems 
to make up to Itself for being unable to master the 
world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by 
throwing all its force into style, by bending language 
at any rate to its will, and expressing the ideas it 
has with unsurpassable Intensity, elevation, and effect. 
It has all through it a sort of Intoxication of style, — 
a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the name 
of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the 
power of style seems to have exercised an Inspiring 
and Intoxicating effect ; and not in Its great poets 
only. In Tallesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Osslan, does 



( 145 ) 

the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but In all its 
productions :— ^ 

The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr ; 
Here i$ the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd ; 
But unknown is the grave of Arthur. 

That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the 
Graves of the Warriors^ and if we compare it with 
the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English 
churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism 
in us that our productions offer abundant examples 
of German want of style as well as of its opposite) : — 

Afflictions sore long time I bore, 
Physicians were in vain, 
Till God did please Death should me seize 
And ease me of my pain — 

if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with 
the English, which in their Gemeinheit of style are 
truly Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what 
that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking 
of is. 

Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus 
the Culdee, whose Feliri, or festology, I have 
already mentioned ; — a festology in which, at the 
end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century, 

lO 



( 146 ) 

he collected from '' the countless hosts of the illumi- 
nated books of Erin" (to use his own words) the 
festivals of the Irish saints, his poem having a stanza 
for every day in the year. The epitaph on Angus, 
who died at Cluain Eidhnech, in Queen's County, 
runs thus : — 

Angus in the assembly of Heaven, 
Here are his tomb and his bed; 
It is from hence he went to death, 
In the Friday, to holy Heaven. 

It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear'd ; 
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried ; 
In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses, 
He first read his psalms. 

That is by no eminent hand ; and yet a Greek 
epitaph could not show a finer perception of what 
constitutes propriety and felicity of style in com- 
positions of this nature. Take the well-known 
Welsh prophecy about the fate of the Britons : — 

Their Lord they will praise. 
Their speech they will keep, 
Their land they ^vill lose, 
Except wild Wales. 

To however late an epoch that prophecy belongs, 



( H7 ) 

what a feeling for style, at any rate, it manifests ! 
And the same thing may be said of the famous 
Welsh triads. We may put aside all the vexed 
questions as to their greater or less antiquity, 
and still what important witness they bear to the 
genius for literary style of the people who produced 
them ! 

Now we English undoubtedly exhibit very often 
the want of sense for style of our German kinsmen. 
The churchyard lines I just now quoted afford an 
instance of it ; but the whole branch of our literature, 
— and a very popular branch it is, our hymnology, — 
to which those lines are to be referred, is one con- 
tinued instance of it. Our German kinsmen and we 
are the great people for hymns. The Germans are 
very proud of their hymns, and we are very proud 
of ours ; but it is hard to say which of the two, the 
German hymn-book or ours, has least poetical worth 
in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical 
power in the people producing it. I have not a 
word to say against Sir Roundell Palmer's choice and 
arrangement of materials for his Book of Praise ; 
I am content to put them on a level (and that is 
giving them the highest possible rank) with Mr. 

lO 2 



( h8 ) 

Palgrave's choice and arrangement of materials for 
his Golden Treasury ; but yet no sound critic can 
doubt that, so far as poetry is concerned, while 
the Golden Treasury is a monument of a nation's 
strength, the Book of Praise is a monument of a 
nation's weakness. Only the German race, with Its 
want of quick instinctive tact, of delicate, sure per- 
ception, could have invented the hymn as the 
Germans and we have it ; and our non-German 
turn for style, — style, of which the very essence is a 
certain happy fineness and truth of poetical percep- 
tion, — could not but desert us when our German 
nature carried us into a kind' of composition which 
can please only when the perception is somewhat 
blunt. Scarcely any one of us ever judges our 
hymns fairly, because works of this kind have two 
sides, — their side for religion and their side for poetry. 
Everything which has helped a man in his religious 
life, everything which associates itself in his mind 
with the growth of that life, is beautiful and vene- 
rable to him ; in this way, productions of little or no 
poetical value, like the German hymns and ours, 
may come to be regarded as very precious. Their 
worth In this sense, as means by which we have been 



( 149 ) 

edified, I do not for a moment hold cheap ; but there 
is an edification proper to all our stages of develop- 
ment, the highest as well as the lowest, and It Is for 
man to press on towards the highest stages of his 
development, with the certainty that for those stages, 
too, means of edification will not be found wanting. 
Now certainly It is a higher state of development 
when our fineness of perception is keen than when 
it Is blunt. And if, — whereas the Semitic genius 
placed Its highest spiritual life in the religious senti- 
ment, and made that the basis of its poetry, — the 
Indo-European genius places its highest spiritual life 
in the imaginative reason, and makes that the basis 
of its poetry, we are none the better for wanting the 
perception to discern a natural law, which Is, after 
all, like every natural law. Irresistible ; we are none 
the better for trying to make ourselves Semitic, 
when Nature has made us Indo-European, and to 
shift the basis of our poetry. We may mean well ; 
all manner of good may happen to us on the road 
we go ; but we are not on our own real right road, 
the road we must In the end follow. 

That Is why, when our hymns betray a false 
tendency by losing a power which accompanies 



( ISO ) 

the poetical work of our race on our other more 
suitable lines, the indication thus given is of great 
value and instructiveness for us. One of our main 
gifts for poetry deserts us in our hymns, and so 
gives us a hint as to the one true basis for 
the spiritual work of an Indo-European people, 
which the Germans, who have not this particular 
gift of ours, do not and cannot get in this way, 
though they may get it in others. It is worth 
noticing that the masterpieces of the spiritual work 
of Indo-Europeans taking the pure religious senti- 
ment, and not the imaginative reason, for their 
basis, are works like the Imitation, the Dies Irce, 
the Stabat Mater, — works clothing themselves in 
the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice of 
no Indo-European nation. The perfection of their 
kind, but that kind not perfectly legitimate, they 
take a language not perfectly legitimate ; as if to 
show, that when mankind's Semitic age is once 
passed, the age which produced the great incom- 
parable monuments of the pure religious sentiment, 
the books of Job and Isaiah, the Psalms, — works 
truly to be called inspired, because the same divine 
power which worked in those who produced them 



( 151 ) 

works no longer, — as if to show us, that, after this 
primitive age, we I ndo- Europeans must feel these 
works without attempting to remake them ; and that 
our poetry, if it tries to make itself simply the organ 
of the religious sentiment, leaves the true course, 
and must conceal this by not speaking a living lan- 
guage. The moment it speaks a living language, 
and still makes itself the organ of the religious 
sentiment only, as in the German and English 
hymns, it betrays weakness ; — the weakness of all 
false tendency. 

But if, by attending to the Germanism in us 
English and to its works, one has come to doubt 
whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by 
genius and with the German deadness to style, one 
has only to repeat to oneself a line of Milton, — a 
poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as 
Taliesin or Pindar, — to see that we have another side 
to our genius beside the German one. Whence do we 
get it ? The Normans may have brought in among 
us the Latin sense for rhetoric and style, — for, indeed, 
this sense goes naturally with a high spirit and a 
strenuousness like theirs, — but the sense for style 
which English poetry shows is something finer than 



( 152 ) 

we could well have got from a people so positive 
and so little poetical as the Normans ; and it seems 
to me we may much more plausibly derive it from a 
root of the poetical Celtic nature in us. 

Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy, 
again, its Titanism as we see it in Byrpn, — what 
other European poetry possesses that like the 
English, and where do we get it from ? The Celts, 
with their vehement reaction against the despotism 
of fact, with their sensuous nature, their manifold 
striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calami- 
ties, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of 
piercing regret and passion, — of this Titanism in 
poetry. A famous book, Macpherson's Ossian, 
carried in the last century this vein like a flood of 
lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise 
Macpherson's Ossian here. Make the part of what 
is forged, modern, taw^dry, spurious, in the book, as 
large as you please ; strip Scotland, if you like, of 
every feather of borrowed plumes which on the 
strength of Macpherson's Ossia7t she may have stolen 
from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the 
Ossianic poetry, Ireland ; I make no objection. But 
there will still be left in the book a residue with the 



( 153 ) 

very soul of the Celtic genius in It, and which has 
the proud distinction of having brought this soul of 
the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the 
nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our 
poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, 
and Selma with its silent halls ! — we all owe them a 
debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough 
to forget It, may the Muse forget us ! Choose any 
one of the better passages in Macpherson's Ossian 
and you can see even at this time of day what an 
apparition of newness and power such a strain must 
have been to the eighteenth century : — 

" I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they 
were desolate. The fox looked out from the win- 
dows, the rank grass of the, wall waved round her 
head. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over 
the land of strangers. They have but fallen before 
us, for one day we must fall. Why dost thou build 
the hall, son of the winged days } Thou lookest 
from thy towers to-day ; yet a few years, and the 
blast of the desert comes ; It howls in thy empty 
court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let 
the blast of the desert come ! we shall be renowned 
in our day." 



( 154 ) 

All Europe felt the power of that melancholy ; 
but what I wish to point out is, that no nation of 
Europe so caught in its poetry the passionate pene- 
trating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of 
Titanism, as the English. Goethe, like Napoleon, 
felt the spell of Ossian very powerfully, and he 
quotes a long passage from him in his Werther. 
But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and Titanic 
about the German Werther, that amiable, culti- 
vated, and melancholy young man, having for his 
sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that 
Lotte cannot be his ? Faust, again, has nothing 
unaccountable, defiant and Titanic in him ; his 
knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he 
expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself 
poor and growing old, and baulked of the palpable 
enjoyment of life ; and here is the motive for Faust's 
discontent. In the most energetic and impetuous 
of Goethe's creations, — his Prometheus,-^\\. is not 
Celtic self-will and passion, it is rather the Germanic 
sense of justice and reason, which revolts against the 
despotism of Zeus. The German Sehnsucht itself 
is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a 
struggling, fierce, passionate one. But the Celtic 



( 155 ) 

melancholy Is struggling, fierce, passionate ; to catch 
its note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addres- 
sing his crutch : — 

O my crutch ! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the 
water-flag yellow ? Have I not hated that which I love ? 

O my crutch ! is it not winter-time now, when men talk 
together after that they have drunken ? Is not the side of my 
bed left desolate ? 

O my crutch ! is it not spring, when the cuckoo passes through 
the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea ? The young maidens 
no longer love me. 

O my crutch ! is it not the first day of May ? The furrows, 
are they not shining ; the young corn, is it not springing ? Ah ! 
the sight of thy handle makes me wroth. 

my crutch ! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better ; 
it is very long since I was Llywarch. 

Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my 
head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved. 

The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me 
together, — coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. 

1 am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from 
me ; the couch of honour shall be no more mine ; I am miserable, 
I am bent on my crutch. 

How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he 
was brought forth ! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from 
his burden. 

There is the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, 
turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism 



( 156 ) 

of fact ; and of whom does it remind us so much as 

of Byron ? 

The fire which on my bosom preys 
Is lone as some volcanic isle ; 
No torch is kindled at its blaze ; 
A funeral pile ! 

Or, again : — 

Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
And know, whatever thou hast been, 
'Tis something better not to be. 

One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch 
passages from Byron striking the same note as that 
passage from. Llywarch Hen, and she will not soon 
stop. And all Byron's heroes, not so much in 
collision with outward things, as breaking on some 
rock of revolt and misery in the depths of their own 
nature ; Manfred, self-consumed, fighting blindly 
and passionately with I know not what, having 
nothing of the consistent development and in- 
telligible motive of Faust, — Manfred, Lara, Cain, 
what are they but Titanic ? Where in European 
poetry are we to find this Celtic passion of revolt 
so warm-breathing, puissant, and sincere ; except 
perhaps in the creation of a yet greater poet 



( 157 ) 

than Byron, but an English poet, too, like Byron, 
— in the Satan of Milton ? * 

.... What though the field be lost ? 
All is not lost ; the unconquerable will, 
And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
And courage never to submit or yield, 
And what is else not to be overcome. 

There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition 
the Celtic fibre was not wholly a stranger ! 

And as, after noting the Celtic Pindarism or 
power of style present in our poetry, we noted the 
German flatness coming in in our hymns, -and found 
here a proof of our compositeness of nature ; so, 
after noting the Celtic Titanism or power of re- 
bellious passion in our poetry, we may also note the 
Germanic patience and reasonableness in it, and get 
in this way a second proof how mixed a spirit we 
have. After Llywarch Hen's : — 

How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he 
was brought forth — 

after Byron's : — 

Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen — 

take this of Southey's, in answer to the question 



( 158 ) 

whether he would like to have his youth over 

again : — 

Do I regret the past ? 

Would I live o'er again 

The morning hours of life ? 

Nay, William, nay, not so ! 

Praise be to God who made me what I am, 

Other I would not be. 

There we have the other side of our being; the 
Germanic goodness, docility, and fidelity to nature, 
in place of the Celtic Titanism. 
I The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and 
distinguished gave his poetry style ; his indomitable 
personality gave it pride and passion ; his sensibility 
and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the 
gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical 
charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling 
spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. 
They have a mysterious life and grace there ; they 
are nature's own children, and utter her secret in a 
way which makes them something quite different 
from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and 
Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic 
romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems 
impossible to believe the power did not come into 



( 159 ) . 

romance from the Celts.'" Magic is just the word 
for it, — the magic of nature ; not merely the beauty 
of nature, — that the Greeks and Latins had ; not 
merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism, 
— that the Germans had ; but the intimate life of 
nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. As 
the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant whole- 
some smack of the soil in them, — Weathersfield, 
Thaxted, Shalford, — are to the Celtic names of 
places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty, — Velindra, 
Tyntagel, Caernarvon, — so is the homely realism of 
German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness 
of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for his 
pupil : " Well," says Math, '' we will seek, I and 
thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him 
out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the 
oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms 
of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a 
maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever 



* Rhyme, — the most striking characteristic of our modern 
poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main 
source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its 
romantic elemefit, — rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends 
to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts. 



( i6o ) 

saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the 
name of Flower-Aspect." Celtic romance is full of 
exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of 
the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply 
nature lets him come into her secrets. The quick 
dropping of blood is called " faster than the fall of 
the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the 
earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest." And 
thus is Olwen described : " More yellow was her hair 
than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter 
than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her 
hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood- 
anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains." 
For loveliness it would be hard to beat that ; and for 
magical clearness and nearness take the following : — 
" And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, 
and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's 
cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there 
he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, 
and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow 
had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a 
wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the 
horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted 
upon the bird. And Peredur stood and compared 



( i6i ) 

the blackness of the raven, and the v/hiteness of the 
snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of 
the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker 
than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter 
than the snow, and to her two cheeks, which were 
redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be." 

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not 
less beautiful :— 

" And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the 
wood, and they came to an open country, with 
meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the 
meadows. And there was a river before them, and 
the horses bent down and drank the water. And 
they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and 
there they met a slender stripling with a satchel 
about his neck ; and he had a small blue pitcher in 
his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher." 

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek 
in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the 
romance touch : — 

" And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, 
one-half of which was in flames from the root to the 
top, and the other half was green and in full leaf." 

Magic is the word to insist upon, — a magically 

1 1 



( i62 ) 

vivid and near interpretation of nature ; since It Is 
this which constitutes the special charm and power 
of the effect I am calHng attention to, and it is for 
this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar 
aptitude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, 
and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism. 
In the first place, Europe tends constantly to 
become more and more one community, and we 
tend to become Europeans instead of merely 
Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians ; so 
whatever aptitude or felicity one people imparts into 
spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus 
tends to become the common property of all. 
Therefore anything so beautiful and attractive as 
the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, now- 
a-days, if it appears in the productions of the 
Celts, or of the English, or of the French, to 
appear in the productions of the Germans also, 
or in the productions of the Italians ; but there 
will be a stamp of perfectness and inlmitableness 
about it in the literatures where it is native, which 
it will not have in the literatures where it is not 
native. Novalls or Ruckert, for Instance, have their 
eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling 



( i63 ) 

for natural magic ; a rough-and-ready critic easily 
credits them and the Germans with the Celtic fine- 
ness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her 
secret ; but the question is whether the strokes in 
the German's picture of nature''' have ever the 
indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the 
Celt's touch In the pieces I just now quoted, or of 
Shakspeare's touch in his daffodil, Wordsworth's in 
his cuckoo, Keats's In his Autumn, Obermann's in his 
niountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the 
Swiss farms. To decide where the gift for natural 

* Take the following attempt to render the natural magic 
supposed to pervade Tieck's poetry : — " In diesen Dichtungen 
herrscht eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einver- 
standniss mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen-und Steinreich. 
Der Leser fiihlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er 
hort die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen ; wildfremde 
Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten sehnsiichtigen 
Augen ; unsichtbare Lippen kiissen seine Wangen mit neckender 
Zartlichkeit ; hohe Pilze, wie goldne Glockeii, wachsen klingend 
empor a7n Fusse der Bdume; " and so on. Now that stroke of the 
hohe Filze, the great funguses, would have been impossible to the 
tact and delicacy of a born lover of nature like the Celt, and 
could only have come from a German who has hineinstudirt 
himself into natural magic. It is a crying false note, which 
carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic and the breath 
of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of 
gas and orange-peel. 

II 2 



( 164 ) 

magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or 
Germanic, we must decide this question. 

In the second place, there are many ways of 
handling nature, and we are here only concerned 
with one of them ; but a rough-and-ready critic 
imagines that it is all the same so long as nature 
is handled at all, and fails to draw the needful 
distinction between modes of handling her. But 
these modes are many ; I will mention four of them 
now : there is the conventional way of handling 
nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, 
there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is 
the magical way of handling nature. In all these 
three last the eye is on the object, but with a diffe- 
rence ; in the faithful way of handling nature, the 
eye is on the object, and that is all you can say ; in 
the Greek, the eye Is on the object, but lightness 
and brightness are added ;• in the magical, the eye is 
on the object, but charm and magic are added. In 
the conventional way of handling nature, the eye Is 
not on the object ; what that means we all know, we 
have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry : — 

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night — 



( 165 ) 

to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry 

supplies plenty of instances too ; if we put this from 

Propertius's Hylas : — 

. . . manus heroum 

Mollia composita litora fronde tegit — 

side by side the line of Theocritus by which it was 
suggested : — 

\ufX(i}V yap afiv Ikhto fikyag, arifiadeaaiv oveiap — 

we get at the same moment a good specimen both 
of the conventional and of the Greek way of 
handling nature. But from our own poetry we may 
get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, 
as well as of the conventional : for instance, 
Keats's : — 

What little town by river or seashore, 
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel. 
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn ? 

is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theo- 
critus ; it is composed with the eye on the object, a 
radiancy and light clearness being added. German 
poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of 
handling nature ; an excellent example is to be 
found in the stanzas called Ztceignung, prefixed to 
Goethe's poems ; the morning walk, the mist, the 



( i66 ) 

dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are 

given with the eye on the object, but there the 

merit of the work, as a handling of natu/e, stops ; 

iS 
neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic are added ; 

the power of these is not what gives the poem in 

question its merit, but a power of quite another 

kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But 

the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give 

to his handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one 

who will read his Wanderer, — the poem in which a 

wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her 

child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple 

near Cuma, — may see. Only the power of natural 

magic Goethe does not, I think, give ; whereas 

Keats passes at will from the Greek power to that 

power which is, as I say, Celtic ; from his : — 

What little town, by river or seashore — 

to his : — 

White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine, 
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves — 



or his 



. . . magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn — 



( i67 ) 

in which the very same note is struck as in those 
extracts which I quoted from Cehic romance, and 
struck with authentic and unmistakeable power. 

Shakspeare, in handHng nature, touches this 
Cehic note so exquisitely, that perhaps one is in- 
cHned to be always looking for the Celtic note in 
him, and not to recognise his Greek note when it 
comes. But if one attends well to the difference 
between the two notes, and bears in mind, to guide 
one, such things as Virgil's ** moss-grown springs 
and grass softer than sleep : " — I 

Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba — 
as his charming flower-gatherer, who : — 

Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens 
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi — 

as his quinces and chestnuts : — 

. . . cana legam tenera lanugine mala 
Castaneasque nuces 

then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in 
Shakspeare's : — 

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, 
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, 
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine — 



( i68 ) 

it Is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, 

again in his : — 

look how the floor of heaven 

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ! 

we are at the very point of transition from the 
Greek note to the Celtic ; there is the Greek clear- 
ness and brightness, with the Celtic aerialness and 
magic coming in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable 
Celtic note in passages like this : — 

Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, 
By paved fountain or by rushy brook. 
Or in the beached margent of the sea — 

or this, the last I will quote : — 

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, 
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
And they did make no noise, in such a night 
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls — 

in such a night 

Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew — 

in such a night 

Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand^ 
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 
To cotne again to Carthage. 

And those last lines of all are so drenched and 
intoxicated with the fairy-dew of that natural magic 



( i69 ) 

which IS our theme, that I cannot do better than end 
with them. 

And now, with the pieces of evidence in our 
hand, let us go to those who say it is vain to look 
for Celtic elements in any Englishman, and let us 
ask them, first, if they seize what we mean by the 
power of natural magic in Celtic poetry; secondly, 
if English poetry does not eminently exhibit this 
power; and, thirdly, where they suppose English 
poetry got it from ? 

I perceive that I shall be accused of having 
rather the air, in what I have said, of denying this 
and that gift to the Germans, and of establishing our 
difference from them a little ungraciously and at 
their expense. The truth is, few people have any 
real care to analyse closely in their criticism^ they 
merely employ criticism as a means for heaping all 
praise on what they like, and all blame on what they 
dislike. Those of us (and they are many) who owe 
a great debt of gratitude to the German spirit and 
to German literature, do not like to be told of any 
powers being lacking, there ; we are like the young 
ladies who think the hero of their novel is only half 



( I70 ) 

a hero unless he has all perfections united in him. 
But nature does not work, either in heroes or races, 
according to the young ladies' notion. We all are 
what we are, the hero and the great nation are what 
they are, by our limitations as well as by our powers, 
by lacking something as well as by possessing some- 
thing. It is not always gain to possess this or that 
gift, or loss to lack this or that gift. Our great, our 
only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the 
German ; the grand business of modern poetry, — a 
moral interpretation, from an independent point of 
view, of man and the world, — it is only German poetry, 
Goethe's poetry, that has, since the Greeks, made 
much way with. Campbell's power of style, and the 
natural magic of Keats and Wordsworth, and Byron's 
Titanic personality, may be wanting to this poetry ; 
but see what it has accomplished without them ! 
How much more than Campbell with his power of 
style, and Keats and Wordsworth with their natural 
magic, and Byron with his Titanic personality ! 
Why, for the immense serious task it had to per- 
form, the steadiness of German poetry, its going 
near the ground, its patient fidelity to nature, its 
using great plainness of speech, poetical drawbacks 



( lyi ) 

in one point of view, were safeguards and helps in 

another. The plainness and earnestness of the two 

lines I have already quoted from Goethe : — 

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, 

Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt — 

compared with the play and power of Shakspeare's 
style or Dante's, suggest at once the difference 
between Goethe's task and theirs, and the fitness of 
the faithful laborious German spirit for its own task. 
Dante's task was to set forth the lesson of the world 
from the point of view of mediaeval Catholicism ; the 
basis of spiritual life was given, Dante had not to 
make this anew. Shakspeare's task was to set forth 
the spectacle of the world when man's spirit re-awoke 
to the possession of the world at the Renaissance. 
The spectacle of human life, left to bear its own 
significance and tell its own story, but shown in all 
its fulness, variety, and power, is at that moment 
the great matter ; but, if we are to press deeper, 
the basis of spiritual life is still at that time the 
traditional religion, reformed or unreformed, of 
Christendom, and Shakspeare has not to supply 
a new basis. But when Goethe came, Europe had 
lost her basis of spiritual life ; she had to find it 



( 172 ) 

again ; Goethe's task was, — the inevitable task for 
the modern poet henceforth is, — as it was for the 
Greek poet in the days of Pericles, not to preach a 
sublime sermon on a given text like Dante, not to 
exhibit all the kingdoms of human life and the glory 
of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human life 
afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it. 
This is not only a work for style, eloquence, charm, 
poetry ; it is a work for science ; and the scientific, 
serious German spirit, not carried away by this and 
that intoxication of ear, and eye, and self-will, has 
peculiar aptitudes for it. 

We, on the other hand, do not necessarily gain 
by the commixture of elements in us ; we have seen 
how the clashing of natures in us hampers and 
embarrasses our behaviour ; we might very likely be 
more attractive, we might very likely be more suc- 
cessful, if we were all of a piece. Our want of sure- 
ness of taste, our eccentricity, come in great measure, 
no doubt, from our not being all of a piece, from our 
having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity. 
The Rue de Rivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is 
another, and Stonehenge is another ; but we have a 
turn for all three, and lump them all up together. 



( 173 ) 

Mr. Tom Taylors translations from Breton poetr}'' 
offer a good example of this mixing; he has a 
genuine feeling for these Celtic matters, and often, 
as in the Evil Tribute of Nomenoe, or in Lord Nann 
and the Fairy, he is, both in movement and expres- 
sion, true and appropriate ; but he has a sort of 
Teutonism and Latinism in him too, and so he 
cannot forbear mixing with his Celtic strain such 
disparates as : — 

'Twas mirk, mirk night, and the water bright 
Troubled and drumlie flowed — 

which is evidently Lowland-Scotchy ; or as : — 

Foregad, but thou'rt an artful hand ! 

which is English-stagey ; or as : — 

To Gradlon's daughter, bright of blee, 
Her lover he whispered tenderly — 
Bethink thee, sweet Dahut I the key ! 

which is Anacreontic in the manner of Tom 
Moore. Yes, it is not a sheer advantage to 
have several strings to one's bow ! if we had 
been all German, we might have had the science 
of Germany ; if we had been all Celtic we 
might have been popular and agreeable ; if we had 
been all Latinised, we might have governed Ireland 



( 174 ) 

as the French govern Alsace, without getting our- 
selves detested. But now we have Germanism 
enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism 
enough to make us imperious, and Celtism enough 
to make us self-conscious and awkward ; but German 
fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear 
reason, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, 
we fall short of. Nay, perhaps, if we are doomed to 
perish (Heaven avert the omen !), we shall perish 
by our Celtism, by our self-will and want of patience 
with ideas, our inability to see the way the world is 
going ; and yet those very Celts, by our affinity 
with whom we are perishing, will be hating and 
upbraiding us all the time. 

This is a somewhat unpleasant view to take of the 
matter ; but if it is true, its being unpleasant does not 
make it any less true, and we are always the better 
for seeing the truth. What we here see is not the 
whole truth, however. So long as this mixed con- 
stitution of our nature possesses us, we pay it tribute 
and serve it ; so soon as we possess it, it pays us 
tribute and serves us. So long as we are blindly 
and ignorantly rolled about by the forces of our 
nature, their contradiction baffles us and lames us ; 



( 175 ) 

SO soon as we have clearly discerned what they are, 
and begun to apply to them a law of measure, con- 
trol, and guidance, they may be made to work for 
our good and to carry us forward. Then we may 
have the good of our German part, the good of our 
Latin part, the good of our Celtic part ; and instead 
of one part clashing with the other, we may bring 
it in to continue and perfect the other, when the 
other has given us all the good it can yield, and by 
being pressed further, could only give us its faulty 
excess. Then we may use the German faithfulness 
to Nature to give us science, and to free us from 
insolence and self-will ; we may use the Celtic quick- 
ness of perception to give us delicacy, and to free 
us from hardness and Philistinism ; we may use the 
Latin decisiveness to give us strenuous clear method, 
and to free us from fumbling and idling. Already, In 
their untrained state, these elements give signs, in our 
life and literature, of their being present In us, and 
a kind of prophecy of what they could do for us if 
they were properly observed, trained, and applied. 
But this they have not yet been ; we ride one force 
of our nature to death ; we will be nothing but Anglo- 
Saxons in the Old World or in the New ; and when 



( 176 ) 

our race has built Bold Street, Liverpool, and pro- 
nounced it very good, it hurries across the Atlantic, 
and builds Nashville, and Jacksonville, and Mill- 
edgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the designs of 
Providence in an incomparable manner. But true 
Anglo-Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the 
German nature, we are not and cannot be ; all we 
have accomplished by our onesidedness is to blur 
and confuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, 
and to become something eccentric, unattractive, and 
inharmonious. 

A man of exquisite intelligence and charming 
character, the late Mr. Cobden, used to fancy that a 
better acquaintance with the United States was the 
grand panacea for us ; and once in a speech he 
bewailed the inattention of our seats of learning to 
them, and seemed to think that if our ingenuous 
youth at Oxford were taught a little less about the 
Ilissus, and a little more about Chicago, we should 
all be the better for it. Chicago has its claims upon 
us, no doubt ; but it is evident that from the point 
of view to which I have been leading, a stimulation 
of our Anglo-Saxonism, such as is intended by 
Mr. Cobden's proposal, does not appear the thing 



I 



( "^11 ) 

most needful for us ; seeing our American brothers 
themselves have rather, like us, to try and moderate 
the flame of Anglo-Saxonism in their own breasts, 
than to ask us to clap the bellows to it in ours. So 
I am inclined to beseech Oxford, instead of expiating 
her over-addiction to the Ilissus by lectures on 
Chicago, to give us an expounder for a still more 
remote-looking object than the Ilissus, — the Celtic 
languages and literature. And yet why should I 
call it remote ? if, as I have been labouring to show, 
in the spiritual frame of us English ourselves, a 
Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of 
tracing it, lives and works. Aliens in speech, in 
religio7t, in blood I said Lord Lyndhurst ; the philo- 
logists have set him right about the speech, the 
physiologists about the blood ; and perhaps, taking 
religion in the wide but true sense of our whole 
spiritual activity, those who have followed what I 
have been saying here will think that the Celt is 
not so wholly alien to us in religion. But, at any 
rate, let us consider that of the shrunken and dimin- 
ished remains of this great primitive race, all, with 
one insignificant exception, belongs to the English 
empire ; only Brittany is not ours ; we have Ireland, 

12 



( 178 ) 

the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Corn- 
wall. They are a part of ourselves, we are deeply 
interested 'in knowing them, they are deeply interested 
in being known by us ; and yet in the great and 
rich universities of this great and rich country there 
is no chair of Celtic, there is no study or teaching of 
Celtic matters ; those who want them must go abroad 
for them. It is neither right nor reasonable that 
this should be so. Ireland has had in the last half 
century a band of Celtic students, — a band with 
which death, alas ! has of late been busy, — from 
whence Oxford or Cambridge might have taken an 
admirable professor of Celtic ; and with the autho- 
rity of a university chair, a great Celtic scholar, on 
a subject little known, and where all would have 
readily deferred to him, might have by this time 
doubled our facilities for knowing the Celt, by pro- 
curing for this country Celtic documents which were 
inaccessible here, and preventing the dispersion of 
others which were accessible. It is not much that 
the English Government does for science or litera- 
ture ; but if Eugene O'Curry, from a chair of Celtic 
at Oxford, had appealed to the Government to get 
him copies or the originals of the Celtic treasures 



( 179 ) 

in the Burgundlan Library at Brussels, or in the 
library of St. Isidore's College at Rome, even the 
English Government could not well have refused 
him. The . invaluable Irish manuscripts in the 
Stowe Library the late Sir Robert Peel proposed, 
in 1 849, to buy for the British Museum ; Lord 
Macaulay, one of the trustees of the Museum, 
declared, with the confident shallowness which 
makes him so admired by public speakers and 
leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all 
searchers for truth, that he saw nothing in the 
whole collection worth purchasing for the Museum, 
except the correspondence of Lord Melville on the 
American war. That is to say, this correspondence 
of Lord Melville's was the only thing in the collec- 
tion about which Lord Macaulay himself knew or 
cared. Perhaps an Oxford or Cambridge professor 
of Celtic might have been allowed to make his 
voice heard, on a matter of Celtic manuscripts, even 
against Lord Macaulay. The manuscripts were 
bought by Lord Ashbumham, who keeps them 
shut up, and will let no one consult them (at least 
up to the date when O'Curry published his Lectures 
he did so), " for fear an actual acquaintance with 



( i8o ) 

their contents should decrease their value as matter 
of curiosity at some future transfer or sale." Who 
knows ? Perhaps an Oxford professor of Celtic 
might have touched the flinty heart of Lord Ash- 
burnham. 

At this moment, when the narrow Philistinism 
which has long had things its own way in England, 
is showing its natural fruits, and we are beginning 
to feel ashamed, and uneasy, and alarmed at it ; 
now, when we are becoming aware that we have 
sacrificed to Philistinism culture, and insight, and 
dignity, and acceptance, and weight among the 
nations, and hold on events that deeply concern us, 
and control of the future, and yet that it cannot even 
give us the fool's paradise it promised us, but is apt 
to break down, and to leave us with Mr. Roebuck's 
and Mr. Lowe's laudations of our matchless happiness, 
and the largest circulation in the world assured to 
the Daily Telegraph, for our only comfort ; at such 
a moment it needs some moderation not to be 
attacking Philistinism by storm, but to mine it 
through such gradual means as the slow approaches 
of culture, and the introduction of chairs of. Celtic. 
But the hard unintelligence, which is just now our 



/ 



( i8i ) 

bane, cannot be conquered by storm ; it must be 
suppled and reduced by culture, by a growth in the 
variety, fulness, and sweetness of our spiritual life ; 
and this end can only be reached by studying things 
that are outside of ourselves, and by studying them 
disinterestedly. Let us reunite ourselves with our 
better mind and with the world through science ; and 
let it be one of our angelic revenges on the Philistines, 
who among their other sins are the guilty authors of 
Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and 
to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a 
message of peace to Ireland. 



THE END. 



LONDON : 

'KINTED HY SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 

OLD BAILEY, E.C. 



WORKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED 

BY 

SMITH, ELDER & CO. 



LIFE, LETTERS, AND SPEECHES OF LORD PLUNKET. 

By his Grandson, the Hon. David Plunkkt. With an Introductory 
Preface by Lord Broughajvi, and a Portrait. Two vols. Demy 8vo. 28s. 

TURKEY AND THE CRIMEAN WAR. A Narrative of His- 
torical Events. By Kear-Admiral Sir Adolphcs Slade, K.C.B. 
Demy Svo. 15s. 

A WEEK IN A FRENCH COUNTRY-HOUSE. By Adelaide 
Sartoris. With Two Illustrations, by Frjederick Leighton, A.R.A. 

Svo. 8s. 6d. 

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. A Tragedy. By George Augustus 
SiMCOX, M.A. CTOwn Svo, 5s. 

THE INFERNO OF DANTE. Translated in the Metre of the 
Original. By the Rev. James Ford, M.A., Prebendary of Exeter. 
Cro^vnSvo. 10s. 6d. 

(The Italian Text is printed on the opposite pages of the Translation for the 
Use of Students.) 

THE EARLY ITALIAN POETS. From Ciullo D'AIcamo to Dante 
Alighieri. (1100, 1200, 1300.) Together with Dante's "Vita Nuova." 
Translated by D. G. Kossetti. Crown Svo. 12s. 

SHAKESPEARE COMMENTARIES. By Professor Gervinus. 
Translated by F. E. Bunnett. Two vols. Demy Svo. 24s. 

ON SHAKSPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE AND USE OF THE 
BIBLE. By Charles Wordsavorth, D.C.L., Bishop of St. Andrews. 
With Vignette Illustrations. Second Edition, Enlarged. Crown Svo. 
Elegantly bound, 6s. ; with gilt edges, 7s. 6d. 

SHAKSPERE : His Birthplace and its Neighbourhood. By John 
R. Wise. With Twenty-two Illustrations by W. J. Linton. Crown 
8vo. Printed on Tinted Paper, and Handsomely Bound in Ornamental 
Cloth, gilt edges. 7s. 6d. 

*^* Cheaper Edition, Fcap. Svo. 2s. 6d. 

IDYLLS FROM THE SANSKRIT. By Ralph T. H. Griffith, 
M.A. Fcap 4to, cloth, gilt edges. 10s. 6d. 

COMPANIONS OF MY SOLITUDE. By the Author of *' Friends 
in Council," &c. New Edition. Fcap. Svo. 3s. 6d. 

IN THE SILVER AGE. By Harriet Parr. With Frontispiece. 
Crown Svo. 6s. 
*^* Library Edition in Two Volumes, Crown Svo. With Two Illustrations, 

price 12s. 



2 Works Recently Published — continued. 

LIFE AND DEATH OF JEANNE D'ARC, called " The Maid/' 
By Harriet Parr. With a Portrait. Two vols. Crown 8vo. 1 6s. 

LIFE OF EDMUND MALONE, Editor of Shakspeare. With 
Selections from his Manuscript Anecdotes, Bv Sir James Prior, 
M.RJ.A., F.S.A, With Portrait, Demy 8vo. 14s, 

THE LIFE OF GOETHE. New Edition. Partly Rewritten. 

By G. H. Lewes, One vol. With Portrait. 8vo. 16s. 
ARISTOTLE : a Chapter from the History of Science. With 

Analvses of Aristotle's Scientific Writings, Bv G. H. Lewes. Demv 

Svo, ' I5s, 

REMINISCENCES OF A BENGAL CIVILIAN. By Williaji 
Edwards, Esq., Judge of Her Majesty's High Court of Agra. CroAvn 
Svo. 7s. 6d. 

LIFE AND LETTERS OF THE LATE REV. FREDERICK 
W, ROBERTSON, M,A., Incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton. 
Edited by Stopford A. Brooke, M.A., late Chaplain to H.B.M.'s 
Embassy at Berlin. With Photographic and Steel Portraits. Two vols. 
Crown Svo. 25s. 

RAPHAEL : HIS LIFE AND HIS WORKS. By Alfeed Bakon' 
Von Wolzogex. Translated by F. E. Bunxett. With Photographic 
Portrait. Crown Svo. 9s. 

LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO. By Her?»ian Geimm. Trans- 
lated by F. E. BuxNETT. With Photographic Portrait from the Picture 
in the Vatican. Second Edition. Two vols. Post Svo. 24s, 

A CENTURY OF PAINTERS OF THE ENGLISH SCHOOL ; 

With Critical Notices of their Works, and an Account of the Progress 
of Art in England, By Richard Redgrave, R.A. (Surveyor of Her 
Majesty's Pictures and Inspector-General for Art), and Samuel Red- 
grave. Two vols. Demy Svo. 32s. 

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE : Three Lectures on Work, 

Traffic, and War. By Johx Rdskix, M.A. Second Edition, Fcap. Svo, 

cloth, gilt edges. 5s. 
THE ETHICS OF THE DUST : Ten Lectures to Little Honse- 

wives on the Elements of Crystallization, By John Ruskin, M.A. 

Crown Svo, 5s. 
SESAIVIE AND LILIES. Two Lectures. I. Of Kings' Treasuries. 

—II, Of Queens' Gardens. By John Ruskix, M.A. Third Edition. 

Fcap. Svo, cloth, gilt edges, 3s. 6d, 
ICELAND ; ITS SCENES AND SAGAS, By Sabixe Baeing- 

GouLD, M.A, With Thirty-five Illustrations and a Map, Royal Svo, 

elegantly bound, gilt edges. 10s. 6d. 
BOOK OF WERE-WOLVES. Being an Account of a Terrible 

Superstition. By Sabine Baring-Gocld, M.A. With Frontispiece, 

CroAvn Svo. 7s. 6d. 



LONDON : SMITH, ELDEli AND CO,, 65, CORNHILL. 



u 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




003 097 192 9 # 



:«-T. 



